diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-36-february-2026/index.md b/content/journal/dispatch-36-february-2026/index.md index b323789..8f5a741 100644 --- a/content/journal/dispatch-36-february-2026/index.md +++ b/content/journal/dispatch-36-february-2026/index.md @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ --- title: "Dispatch #36 (February 2026)" -date: 2026-01-29T22:40:09-05:00 +date: 2026-02-02T00:26:33-05:00 draft: false tags: - dispatch @@ -29,6 +29,42 @@ references: url: https://interconnected.org/home/2025/11/14/arbesman date: 2026-01-06T18:40:18Z file: interconnected-org-9bc7pq.txt +- title: "Things you're allowed to do" + url: https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/ + date: 2026-02-02T05:25:17Z + file: milan-cvitkovic-net-aqgldo.txt +- title: "Singing the gospel of collective efficacy (Interconnected)" + url: https://interconnected.org/home/2026/01/30/efficacy + date: 2026-02-02T05:25:18Z + file: interconnected-org-heqhgj.txt +- title: "The Dilbert Afterlife - by Scott Alexander" + url: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife + date: 2026-02-02T05:25:27Z + file: www-astralcodexten-com-z9axyx.txt +- title: "Manton Reece" + url: https://www.manton.org/2026/01/20/matt-mullenweg-blogged-about-scott.html + date: 2026-02-02T05:25:28Z + file: www-manton-org-to8xs2.txt +- title: "Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why – On my Om" + url: https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/ + date: 2026-02-02T05:25:30Z + file: om-co-i3epdl.txt +- title: "Manton Reece - Velocity and authenticity" + url: https://www.manton.org/2026/01/21/velocity-and-authenticity.html + date: 2026-02-02T05:25:30Z + file: www-manton-org-htmmhe.txt +- title: "ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering" + url: https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering + date: 2026-02-02T05:25:34Z + file: alexharri-com-d1kmv9.txt +- title: "JavaScript Weekly Issue 769: January 20, 2026" + url: https://javascriptweekly.com/issues/769 + date: 2026-02-02T05:25:36Z + file: javascriptweekly-com-bszyss.txt +- title: "Fascists Are Pathetic | Defector" + url: https://defector.com/fascists-are-pathetic + date: 2026-02-02T05:25:46Z + file: defector-com-p9as3r.txt --- Greetings from frigid Durham, North Carolina. We've had an uncharacteristic amount of winter precipitation this month (mostly ice last weekend but a few inches of snow this one). On the one hand, our work is pretty flexible and we've gotten plenty of extra time with the kids. On the other, my home office and all my hobbies are in the basement, where it's presently around 40°F, so I'm about ready for things to get back to normal. @@ -52,7 +88,7 @@ While we were up there, our car finally gave up the ghost. It's been struggling I'm constantly thinking of, and then promptly forgetting, things I need to do, groceries to buy, ideas for these blog posts, etc. I've been on the hunt for some way to quickly capture these fleeting thoughts. I like the idea of a ring that can record voice memos, but [this one][3] requires a $10/mo subscription, and [this one][4] just ... turns into trash after 12-15 hours of recording. -Instead, I played around in the iOS Shortcuts app and made a shortcut that captures text from speech, then looks for a note named for today's date (creating it if necessary), and appends the dictated text to it. Then I made it so that double-tapping the back of the phone launches the shortcut (shout out Viget friend [Max Myers][5]). I'm getting a ton of utility from this, using it throughout my day. [Here's the shortcut if you want to give it a shot.][6] +Instead, I played around in the iOS Shortcuts app and made a shortcut that captures text from speech, then looks for a note named for today's date (creating it if necessary) and appends the dictated text to it. Then I made it so that double-tapping the back of the phone launches the shortcut (shout out Viget friend [Max Myers][5]). I'm getting a ton of utility from this, using it throughout my day. [Here's the shortcut if you want to give it a shot.][6] [3]: https://www.sandbar.com/stream [4]: https://repebble.com/index @@ -63,7 +99,7 @@ Instead, I played around in the iOS Shortcuts app and made a shortcut that captu Still having a blast with the 3D printer (though, again, too cold to operate it at present). Made a ton of toys for the kids, stuff for the house, and (of course) accessories for the printer itself. -Friend of the blog [Tim Hårek][7] linked to [this post about OpenSCAD][8], which lets you define 3D models with code. I downloaded the program and had Codex help me make a stencil for Nev to use for her Valentine's Day cards. Then I ordered this [Crayola airbrush kit][9], which works surprisingly well. She's been having a blast with it. +Friend of the blog [Tim Hårek][7] linked to [this post about OpenSCAD][8], which lets you define 3D models with code. I had Codex help me make a stencil for Nev to use for her Valentine's Day cards. Then I ordered this [Crayola airbrush kit][9], which works shockingly well. She's been having a blast with it. [7]: https://timharek.no/ [8]: https://nuxx.net/blog/2025/12/20/openscad-is-kinda-neat/ @@ -72,26 +108,26 @@ Friend of the blog [Tim Hårek][7] linked to [this post about OpenSCAD][8], whic {{}}Blue 3D pen and a fresh printed “happy valentine’s day! ♥ nev” card on the worktable.{{}} {{}}“Happy Valentine’s day!” and “Nev” stamped on a pink slip with a heart.{{}} -We're doing our [company hackathon][10] in a few weeks, and I'm planning to use the printer to make something with both a physical and digital component (probably involving [AprilTags][11]). +We're doing our [company hackathon][10] in a few weeks, and I'm planning to use the printer to make something with both physical and digital components (probably involving [AprilTags][11]). [10]: https://www.viget.com/articles/the-enduring-point-of-pointless-corp/ [11]: https://ftc-docs.firstinspires.org/en/latest/apriltag/vision_portal/apriltag_intro/apriltag-intro.html -Finally, [RIP Dan McQuade][12]. 43 years old. What the hell. I'm off to go hug my family. +Finally, [RIP Dan McQuade][12]. 43 years old. What the hell. I'm off to hug my family. [12]: https://defector.com/dan-mcquade-1983-2026 ### This Month -* Adventure: -* Project: -* Skill: +* Adventure: keeping it local this month (though I guess I need to get up to DC to deal with the car at some point) but lots of friends and family visiting +* Project: aforementioned hackathon +* Skill: I predict I'm going to struggle to meet all of my commitments this month, so I'm going to give myself a little bit of grace on this one ### Reading & Listening * Fiction: [_The Will of the Many_][13], James Islington ([via][14]) * Non-fiction: [_The Magic of Code_][15], Samuel Arbesman ([via][16]) -* Music: I've got a bit of a backlog here; gonna spend some time with the records I already have (assuming the basement warms up) +* Music: I've got a bit of a backlog here; gonna spend some time with the records I already have rather than buying something new [13]: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Will-of-the-Many/James-Islington/Hierarchy/9781982141189 [14]: https://buttondown.com/nathanlong/archive/food-comas-and-some-bests/ @@ -100,10 +136,32 @@ Finally, [RIP Dan McQuade][12]. 43 years old. What the hell. I'm off to go hug m ### Links -* [Title][17] -* [Title][18] -* [Title][19] +* [Things you're allowed to do][17] ([via][18]) -[17]: https://example.com/ -[18]: https://example.com/ -[19]: https://example.com/ + > This is a list of things you’re allowed to do that you thought you weren’t, or didn’t even know you could. + +* [The Dilbert Afterlife - by Scott Alexander][19] ([via][20]) + + > Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the other will pile on you so massively and traumatically that it will force you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security. + +* [Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why – On my Om][21] ([via][22]) + + > Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity. + +* [ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering][23] ([via][24]) + + > Recently, I’ve been spending my time building an image-to-ASCII renderer. Below is the result — try dragging it around, the demo is interactive! + +* [Fascists Are Pathetic | Defector][25] + + > In Trump's second term, the federal government has intentionally rid itself of the capacity to do anything but make things worse; it has quite literally traded Ph.D scientists and dedicated civil servants for the chance to hastily stand up this expansion team from the waiver wire flotsam of the violence worker community. + +[17]: https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/ +[18]: https://interconnected.org/home/2026/01/30/efficacy +[19]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife +[20]: https://www.manton.org/2026/01/20/matt-mullenweg-blogged-about-scott.html +[21]: https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/ +[22]: https://www.manton.org/2026/01/21/velocity-and-authenticity.html +[23]: https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering +[24]: https://javascriptweekly.com/issues/769 +[25]: https://defector.com/fascists-are-pathetic diff --git a/static/archive/alexharri-com-d1kmv9.txt b/static/archive/alexharri-com-d1kmv9.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0f8970c --- /dev/null +++ b/static/archive/alexharri-com-d1kmv9.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1331 @@ +[1]Alex Harri +[2]About[3]Blog + +ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering + +January 17, 2026 + +Recently, I’ve been spending my time building an image-to-ASCII renderer. Below +is the result — try dragging it around, the demo is interactive! + +One thing I spent a lot of effort on is getting edges looking sharp. Take a +look at this rotating cube example: + +Try opening the “split” view. Notice how well the characters follow the contour +of the square. + +This renderer works well for animated scenes, like the ones above, but we can +also use it to render static images: + +The image of Saturn was [4]generated with ChatGPT. + +Then, to get better separation between different colored regions, I also +implemented a [5]cel shading-like effect to enhance contrast between edges. Try +dragging the contrast slider below: + +The contrast enhancement makes the separation between different colored regions +far clearer. That was key to making the 3D scene above look as good as it does. + +I put so much focus on sharp edges because they’re an aspect of ASCII rendering +that is often overlooked when programmatically rendering images as ASCII. +Consider this animated 3D scene from Cognition’s landing page that is rendered +via ASCII characters: + +Source: [6]cognition.ai + +It’s a cool effect, especially while in motion, but take a look at those blurry +edges! The characters follow the cube contours very poorly, and as a result, +the edges look blurry and jagged in places: + +[cube-logo-zoomed-in] + +This blurriness happens because the ASCII characters are being treated like +pixels — their shape is ignored. It’s disappointing to see because ASCII art +looks so much better when shape is utilized. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen +shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not +really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer. + +I started building my ASCII renderer to prove to myself that it’s possible to +utilize shape in ASCII rendering. In this post, I’ll cover the techniques and +ideas I used to capture shape and build this ASCII renderer in detail. + +We’ll start with the basics of image-to-ASCII conversion and see where the +common issue of blurry edges comes from. After that, I’ll show you the approach +I used to fix that and achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering. At the end, +we’ll improve on that by implementing the contrast enhancement effect I showed +above. + +Let’s get to it! + +Image to ASCII conversion + +ASCII contains [7]95 printable characters that we can use. Let’s start off by +rendering the following image containing a white circle using those ASCII +characters: + +ASCII art is (almost) always rendered using a [8]monospace font. Since every +character in a monospace font is equally wide and tall, we can split the image +into a grid. Each grid cell will contain a single ASCII character. + +The image with the circle is pixels. For the ASCII grid, I’ll pick a row height +of pixels and a column width of pixels. That splits the canvas into rows and +columns — an grid: + +Monospace characters are typically taller than they are wide, so I made each +grid cell a bit taller than it is wide. + +Our task is now to pick which character to place in each cell. The simplest +approach is to calculate a lightness value for each cell and pick a character +based on that. + +We can get a lightness value for each cell by sampling the lightness of the +pixel at the cell’s center: + +We want each pixel’s lightness as a numeric value between and , but our image +data consists of pixels with [9]RGB color values. + +We can use the following formula to convert an RGB color (with component values +between and ) to a lightness value: + +See [10]relative luminance. + +Mapping lightness values to ASCII characters + +Now that we have a lightness value for each cell, we want to use those values +to pick ASCII characters. As mentioned before, ASCII has 95 printable +characters, but let’s start simple with just these characters: + +: - # = + @ * % . + +We can sort them in approximate density order like so, with lower-density +characters to the left, and high-density characters to the right: + +. : - = + * # % @ + +We’ll put these characters in a CHARS array: + +const CHARS = [" ", ".", ":", "-", "=", "+", "*", "#", "%", "@"] + +I added space as the first (least dense) character. + +We can then map lightness values between and to one of those characters like +so: + +function getCharacterFromLightness(lightness: number) { + const index = Math.floor(lightness * (CHARS.length - 1)); + return CHARS[index]; +} + +This maps low lightness values to low-density characters and high lightness +values to high-density characters. + +Rendering the circle from above with this method gives us: + +That works... but the result is pretty ugly. We seem to always get @ for cells +that fall within the circle and a space for cells that fall outside. + +That is happening because we’ve pretty much just implemented nearest-neighbor +downsampling. Let’s see what that means. + +Nearest neighbor downsampling + +Downsampling, in the context of image processing, is taking a larger image (in +our case, the image with the circle) and using that image’s data to construct a +lower resolution image (in our case, the ASCII grid). The pixel values of the +lower resolution image are calculated by sampling values from the higher +resolution image. + +The simplest and fastest method of sampling is [15]nearest-neighbor +interpolation, where, for each cell (pixel), we only take a single sample from +the higher resolution image. + +Consider the circle example again. Using nearest-neighbor interpolation, every +sample either falls inside or outside of the shape, resulting in either or +lightness: + +If, instead of picking an ASCII character for each grid cell, we color each +grid cell (pixel) according to the sampled value, we get the following +pixelated rendering: + +This pixelated rendering is pretty much equivalent to the ASCII rendering from +before. The only difference is that instead of @s we have white pixels, and +instead of spaces we have black pixels. + +These square, jagged looking edges are aliasing artifacts, commonly called [16] +jaggies. They’re a common result of using nearest-neighbor interpolation. + +Supersampling + +To get rid of jaggies, we can collect more samples for each cell. Consider this +line: + +The line’s slope on the axis is . When we pixelate it with nearest-neighbor +interpolation, we get the following: + +Let’s try to get rid of the jagginess by taking multiple samples within each +cell and using the average sampled lightness value as the cell’s lightness. The +example below lets you vary the number of samples using the slider: + +With multiple samples, cells that lie on the edge of a shape will have some of +their samples fall within the shape, and some outside of it. Averaging those, +we get gray in-between colors that smooth the downsampled image. Below is the +same example, but with an overlay showing where the samples are taken: + +This method of collecting multiple samples from the larger image is called [17] +supersampling. It’s a common method of [18]spatial anti-aliasing (avoiding +jaggies at edges). Here’s what the rotating square looks like with +supersampling (using samples for each cell): + +Let’s look at what supersampling does for the circle example from earlier. Try +dragging the sample quality slider: + +The circle becomes less jagged, but the edges feel blurry. Why’s that? + +Well, they feel blurry because we’re pretty much just rendering a +low-resolution, pixelated image of a circle. Take a look at the pixelated view: + +The ASCII and pixelated views are mirror images of each other. Both are just +low-resolution versions of the original high-resolution image, scaled up to the +original’s size — it’s no wonder they both look blurry. + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +Increasing the number of samples is insufficient. No matter how many samples we +take per cell, the samples will be averaged into a single lightness value, used +to render a single pixel. + +And that’s the core problem: treating each grid cell as a pixel in an image. +It’s an obvious and simple method, but it disregards that ASCII characters have +shape. + +We can make our ASCII renderings far more crisp by picking characters based on +their shape. Here’s the circle rendered that way: + +The characters follow the contour of the circle very well. By picking +characters based on shape, we get a far higher effective resolution. The result +is also more visually interesting. + +Let’s see how we can implement this. + +Shape + +So what do I mean by shape? Well, consider the characters T, L, and O placed +within grid cells: + +The character T is top-heavy. Its visual density in the upper half of the grid +cell is higher than in the lower half. The opposite can be said for L — it’s +bottom-heavy. O is pretty much equally dense in the upper and lower halves of +the cell. + +We might also compare characters like L and J. The character L is heavier +within the left half of the cell, while J is heavier in the right half: + +We also have more “extreme” characters, such as _ and ^, that only occupy the +lower or upper portion of the cell, respectively: + +This is, roughly, what I mean by “shape” in the context of ASCII rendering. +Shape refers to which regions of a cell a given character visually occupies. + +Quantifying shape + +To pick characters based on their shape, we’ll somehow need to quantify (put +numbers to) the shape of each character. + +Let’s start by only considering how much characters occupy the upper and lower +regions of our cell. To do that, we’ll define two “sampling circles” for each +grid cell — one placed in the upper half and one in the lower half: + +It may seem odd or arbitrary to use circles instead of just splitting the cell +into two rectangles, but using circles will give us more flexibility later on. + +A character placed within a cell will overlap each of the cell’s sampling +circles to some extent. + +One can compute that overlap by taking a bunch of samples within the circle +(for example, at every pixel). The fraction of samples that land inside the +character gives us the overlap as a numeric value between and : + +For T, we get an overlap of approximately for the upper circle and for the +lower. Those overlap values form a -dimensional vector: + +We can generate such a -dimensional vector for each character within the ASCII +alphabet. These vectors quantify the shape of each ASCII character along these +dimensions (upper and lower). I’ll call these vectors shape vectors. + +Below are some ASCII characters and their shape vectors. I’m coloring the +sampling circles using the component values of the shape vectors: + +We can use the shape vectors as 2D coordinates — here’s every ASCII character +on a 2D plot: + +000.050.050.10.10.150.150.20.20.250.250.30.30.350.350.40.4UpperLower^@qTMuX$g=C + +Shape-based lookup + +Let’s say that we have our ASCII characters and their associated shape vectors +in a CHARACTERS array: + +const CHARACTERS: Array<{ + character: string, + shapeVector: number[], +}> = [...]; + +We can then perform a nearest neighbor search like so: + +function findBestCharacter(inputVector: number[]) { + let bestCharacter = ""; + let bestDistance = Infinity; + + for (const { character, shapeVector } of CHARACTERS) { + const dist = getDistance(shapeVector, inputVector); + if (dist < bestDistance) { + bestDistance = dist; + bestCharacter = character; + } + } + + return bestCharacter; +} + +The findBestCharacter function gives us the ASCII character whose shape best +matches the input lookup vector. + +Note: this brute force search is not very performant. This becomes a bottleneck +when we start rendering thousands of ASCII characters at FPS. I’ll talk more +about this later. + +To make use of this in our ASCII renderer, we’ll calculate a lookup vector for +each cell in the ASCII grid and pass it to findBestCharacter to determine the +character to display. + +Let’s try it out. Consider the following zoomed-in circle as an example. It is +split into three grid cells: + +Overlaying our sampling circles, we see varying degrees of overlap: + +When calculating the shape vector of each ASCII character, we took a huge +number of samples. We could afford to do that because we only need to calculate +those shape vectors once up front. After they’re calculated, we can use them +again and again. + +However, if we’re converting an animated image (e.g. canvas or video) to ASCII, +we need to be mindful of performance when calculating the lookup vectors. An +ASCII rendering might have hundreds or thousands of cells. Multiplying that by +tens or hundreds of samples would be incredibly costly in terms of performance. + +With that being said, let’s pick a sampling quality of with the samples placed +like so: + +For the top sampling circle of the leftmost cell, we get one white sample and +two black, giving us an average lightness of . Doing the same calculation for +all of the sampling circles, we get the following 2D vectors: + +From now on, instead of using the term “lookup vectors”, I’ll call these +vectors, sampled from the image that we’re rendering as ASCII, sampling vectors +. One sampling vector is calculated for each cell in the grid. + +Anyway, we can use these sampling vectors to find the best-matching ASCII +character. Let’s see what that looks like on our 2D plot — I’ll label the +sampling vectors (from left to right) C0, C1, and C2: + +000.10.10.20.20.30.30.40.40.50.50.60.60.70.70.80.80.90.911UpperLowerC0C1C2P$ + +Hmm... this is not what we want. Since none of the ASCII shape vector +components exceed , they’re all clustered towards the bottom-left region of our +plot. This makes our sampling vectors map to a few characters on the edge of +the cluster. + +We can fix this by normalizing the shape vectors. We’ll do that by taking the +maximum value of each component across all shape vectors, and dividing the +components of each shape vector by the maximum. Expressed in code, that looks +like so: + +const max = [0, 0] + +for (const vector of characterVectors) { + for (const [i, value] of Object.entries(vector)) { + if (value > max[i]) { + max[i] = value; + } + } +} + +const normalizedCharacterVectors = characterVectors.map( + vector => vector.map((value, i) => value / max[i]) +) + +Here’s what the plot looks like with the shape vectors normalized: + +000.10.10.20.20.30.30.40.40.50.50.60.60.70.70.80.80.90.911UpperLower^@qTMuX$g=C + +If we now map the sampling vectors to their nearest neighbors, we get a much +more sensible result: + +000.10.10.20.20.30.30.40.40.50.50.60.60.70.70.80.80.90.911UpperLowerC0C1C2M$' + +We get ', M and $. Let’s see how well those characters match the circle: + +Nice! They match very well. + +Let’s try rendering the full circle from before with the same method: + +Much better than before! The picked characters follow the contour of the circle +very well. + +Limits of a 2D shape vector + +Using two sampling circles — one upper and one lower — produces a much better +result than the -dimensional (pixelated) approach. However, it still falls +short when trying to capture other aspects of a character’s shape. + +For example, two circles don’t capture the shape of characters that fall in the +middle of the cell. Consider -: + +For -, we get a shape vector of . That doesn’t represent the character very +well at all. + +The two upper-lower sampling circles also don’t capture left-right differences, +such as the difference between p and q: + +We could use such differences to get better character picks, but our two +sampling circles don’t capture them. Let’s add more dimensions to our shape to +fix that. + +Increasing to 6 dimensions + +Since cells are taller than they are wide (at least with the monospace font I’m +using), we can use sampling circles to cover the area of each cell quite well: + +sampling circles capture left-right differences, such as between p and q, while +also capturing differences across the top, bottom, and middle regions of the +cell, differentiating ^, -, and _. They also capture the shape of “diagonal” +characters like / to a reasonable degree. + +One problem with this grid-like configuration for the sampling circles is that +there are gaps. For example, . falls between the sampling circles: + +To compensate for this, we can stagger the sampling circles vertically (e.g. +lowering the left sampling circles and raising the right ones) and make them a +bit larger. This causes the cell to be almost fully covered while not causing +excessive overlap across the sampling circles: + +We can use the same procedure as before to generate character vectors using +these sampling circles, this time yielding a -dimensional vector. Consider the +character L: + +For L, we get the vector: + +I’m presenting -dimensional shape vectors in a matrix form because it’s easier +to grok geometrically, but the actual vector is a flat list of numbers. + +The lightness values certainly look L-shaped! The 6D shape vector captures L’s +shape very well. + +Nearest neighbor lookups in a 6D space + +Now we have a 6D shape vector for every ASCII character. Does that affect +character lookups (how we find the best matching character)? + +Earlier, in the findBestCharacter function, I referenced a getDistance +function. That function returns the [22]Euclidean distance between the input +points. Given two 2D points and , the formula to calculate their Euclidean +distance looks like so: + +This generalizes to higher dimensions: + +Put into code, this looks like so: + +function getDistance(a: number[], b: number[]): number { + let sum = 0; + for (let i = 0; i < a.length; i++) { + sum += (a[i] - b[i]) ** 2; + } + return Math.sqrt(sum); +} + +Note: since we’re just using this for the purposes of finding the closest +point, we can skip the expensive Math.sqrt() call and just return the squared +distance. It does not affect the result. + +So, no, the dimensionality of our shape vector does not change lookups at all. +We can use the same getDistance function for both 2D and 6D. + +With that out of the way, let’s see what the 6D approach yields! + +Trying out the 6D approach + +Our new 6D approach works really well for flat shapes, like the circle example +we’ve been using: + +Now let’s see how this approach works when we render a 3D scene with more +shades of gray: + +Firstly, the outer contours look nice and sharp. I also like how well the +gradients across the sphere and cone look. + +However, internally, the objects all kind of blend together. The edges between +surfaces with different lightnesses aren’t sharp enough. For example, the +lighter faces of the cubes all kind of blend into one solid color. When there +is a change in color — like when two faces of a cube meet — I’d like to see +more sharpness in the ASCII rendering. + +To demonstrate what I mean, consider the following split: + +It’s currently rendered like so: + +The different shades result in is on the left and Bs on the right, but the +boundary is not very sharp. + +By applying some effects to the sampling vector, we can enhance the contrast at +the boundary so that it appears sharper: + +The added contrast makes a big difference in readability for the 3D scene. +Let’s look at how we can implement this contrast enhancement effect. + +Contrast enhancement + +Consider cells overlapping a color boundary like so: + +For the cells on the boundary, we get a 6D sampling vector that looks like so: + +To make future examples easier to visualize, I’ll start drawing the sampling +vector using circles like so: + +0.65 +0.65 +0.31 +0.31 +0.22 +0.22 + +Currently, this sampling vector resolves to the character T: + +0.65 +0.65 +0.31 +0.31 +0.22 +0.22 +→ +T +Picked character: T + +That’s a sensible choice. The character T is visually dense in the top half and +less so in the bottom half, so it matches the image fairly well. + +Still, I want the picked character to emphasize the shape of the boundary +better. We can achieve that by enhancing the contrast of the sampling vector. + +To increase the contrast of our sampling vector, we might raise each component +of the vector to the power of some exponent. + +Consider how an exponent affects values between and . Numbers close to +experience a strong pull towards while larger numbers experience less pull. For +example, , a 90% reduction, while , only a reduction of 10%. + +The level of pull depends on the exponent. Here’s a chart of for values of +between and : + +[x-pow-2-chart] + +This effect becomes more pronounced with higher exponents: + +[x-pow-n-chart] + +A higher exponent translates to a stronger pull towards zero. + +Applying an exponent should make dark values darker more quickly than light +ones. The example below allows you to vary the exponent applied to the sampling +vector: + +0.65 +0.65 +0.31 +0.31 +0.22 +0.22 +Exponent +[24][1 ]121 + +As the exponent is increased to , the darker components of the sampling vector +quickly become much darker, just like we wanted. However, the lighter +components also get pulled towards zero by a significant amount. + +I don’t want that. I want to increase the contrast between the lighter and +darker components of the sampling vector, not the vector in its entirety. + +To achieve that, we can normalize the sampling vector to the range prior to +applying the exponent, and then “denormalize” the vector back to the original +range afterwards. + +The normalization to can be done by dividing each component by the maximum +component value. After applying the exponent, mapping back to the original +range is done by multiplying each component by the same max value: + +const maxValue = Math.max(...samplingVector) + +samplingVector = samplingVector.map((value) => { + value = value / maxValue; // Normalize + value = Math.pow(value, exponent); + value = value * maxValue; // Denormalize + return value; +}) + +Here’s the same example, but with this normalization applied: + +0.65 +0.65 +0.31 +0.31 +0.22 +0.22 +Exponent +[26][1 ]121 + +Very nice! The lightest component values are retained, and the contrast between +the lighter and darker components is increased by “crunching” the lower values. + +This affects which character is picked. The following example shows how the +selected character changes as the contrast is increased: + +0.65 +0.65 +0.31 +0.31 +0.22 +0.22 +→ +T +Picked character: T +Exponent +[27][1 ]121 + +Awesome! The pick of " over T emphasizes the separation between the lighter +region above and the darker region below! + +By enhancing the contrast of the sampling vector, we exaggerate its shape. This +gives us a character that less faithfully represents the underlying image, but +improves readability as a whole by enhancing the separation between different +colored regions. + +Let’s look at another example. Observe how the L-shape of the sampling vector +below becomes more pronounced as the exponent increases, and how that affects +the picked character: + +0.68 +0.31 +0.76 +0.31 +0.77 +0.78 +→ +& +Picked character: & +Exponent +[28][1 ]121 + +Works really nicely! I love the transition from & -> b -> L as the L-shape of +the vector becomes clearer. + +What’s nice about applying exponents to normalized sampling vectors is that it +barely affects vectors that are uniform in value. If all component values are +similar, applying an exponent has a minimal effect: + +0.64 +0.52 +0.62 +0.51 +0.60 +0.50 +→ +& +Picked character: & +Exponent +[29][1 ]121 + +Because the vector is fairly uniform, the exponent only has a slight effect and +doesn’t change the picked character. + +This is a good thing! If we have a smooth gradient in our image, we want to +retain it. We very much do not want to introduce unnecessary choppiness. + +Compare the 3D scene ASCII rendering with and without this contrast +enhancement: + +We do see more contrast at boundaries, but this is not quite there yet. Some +edges are still not sharp enough, and we also observe a “staircasing” effect +happening at some boundaries. + +Let’s look at the staircasing effect first. We can reproduce it with a boundary +like so: + +Below is the ASCII rendering of that boundary. Notice how the lower edge (the ! +s) becomes “staircase-y” as you increase the exponent: + +We see a staircase pattern like so: + + !!!!! + !!!!!!!!!! + !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! +!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! + +To understand why that’s happening, let’s consider the row in the middle of the +canvas, progressing from left to right. As we start off, every sample is +equally light, giving us Us: + +UUUUUUUU -> + +As we reach the boundary, the lower right samples become a bit darker. Those +darker components are crunched by contrast enhancement, giving us some Ys: + +0.60 +0.60 +0.60 +0.60 +0.40 +0.30 +→ +A +Picked character: A +Exponent +[32][1 ]121 + +So we get: + +UUUUUUUUYY -> + +As we progress further right, the middle and lower samples get darker, so we +get some fs: + +0.60 +0.60 +0.55 +0.46 +0.32 +0.26 +→ +f +Picked character: f + +This trend continues towards ", ', and finally, `: + +0.54 +0.45 +0.34 +0.25 +0.20 +0.20 +→ +! +Picked character: ! +Exponent +[34][1 ]121 + +Giving us a sequence like so: + +UUUUUUUUYYf""''` -> + +That looks good, but at some point we get no light samples. Once we get no +light samples, our contrast enhancement has no effect because every component +is equally light. This causes us to always get !s: + +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +→ +! +Picked character: ! +Exponent +[36][1 ]121 + +Making our sequence look like so: + +UUUUUUUUYYf""''`!!!!!!!!!! -> + +This sudden stop in contrast enhancement having an effect is what causes the +staircasing effect: + + !!!!! + !!!!!!!!!! + !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! +!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! + +Let’s see how we can counteract this staircasing effect with another layer of +contrast enhancement, this time looking outside of the boundary of each cell. + +Directional contrast enhancement + +We currently have sampling circles arranged like so: + +For each of those sampling circles, we’ll specify an “external sampling +circle”, placed outside of the cell’s boundary, like so: + +Each of those external sampling circles is “reaching” into the region of a +neighboring cell. Together, the samples that are collected by the external +sampling circles constitute an “external sampling vector”. + +Let’s simplify the visualization and consider a single example. Imagine that we +collected a sampling vector and an external sampling vector that look like so: + +0.51 +0.51 +0.52 +0.52 +0.53 +0.53 +0.80 +0.51 +0.57 +0.52 +0.53 +0.53 +→ +U +Picked character: U + +The circles colored red are the external sampling vector components. Currently, +they have no effect. + +The “internal” sampling vector itself is fairly uniform, with values ranging +from to . The external vector’s values are similar, except in the upper left +region where the values are significantly lighter ( and ). This indicates a +color boundary above and to the left of the cell. + +To enhance this apparent boundary, we’ll darken the top-left and middle-left +components of the sampling vector. We can do that by applying component-wise +contrast enhancement using the values from the external vector. + +In the previous contrast enhancement, we calculated the maximum component value +across the sampling vector and normalized the vector using that value: + +const maxValue = Math.max(...samplingVector) + +samplingVector = samplingVector.map((value) => { + value = value / maxValue; // Normalize + value = Math.pow(value, exponent); + value = value * maxValue; // Denormalize + return value; +}) + +But the new component-wise contrast enhancement will take the maximum value +between each component of the sampling vector and the corresponding component +in the external sampling vector: + +samplingVector = samplingVector.map((value, i) => { + const maxValue = Math.max(value, externalSamplingVector[i]) + // ... +}); + +Aside from that, the contrast enhancement is performed in the same way: + +samplingVector = samplingVector.map((value, i) => { + const maxValue = Math.max(value, externalSamplingVector[i]); + value = value / maxValue; + value = Math.pow(value, exponent); + value = value * maxValue; + return value; +}); + +The example below shows how light values in the external sampling vector push +values in the sampling vector down: + +0.51 +0.51 +0.52 +0.52 +0.53 +0.53 +0.80 +0.51 +0.57 +0.52 +0.53 +0.53 +→ +U +Picked character: U +Exponent +[42][1 ]141 + +I call this “directional contrast enhancement”, since each of the external +sampling circles reaches outside of the cell in the direction of the sampling +vector component that it is enhancing the contrast of. I describe the other +effect as “global contrast enhancement” since it acts on all of the sampling +vector’s components together. + +Let’s see what this directional contrast enhancement does to get rid of the +staircasing effect: + +Hmm, that’s not doing what I wanted. I wanted to see a sequence like so: + + ..::!! + ..::!!!!!!!! +..::!!!!!!!!!!!!!! + +But we just see ! changing to : + +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.40 +0.35 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +→ +! +Picked character: ! +Exponent +[44][1 ]141 + +This happens because the directional contrast enhancement doesn’t reach far +enough into our sampling vector. The light upper values in the external vector +do push the upper values of the sampling vector down, but because the lightness +of the four bottom components is retained, we don’t get to ., just :. + +Widening the directional contrast enhancement + +I’d like to “widen” the directional contrast enhancement so that, for example, +light external values at the top spread to the middle components of the +sampling vector. + +To do that, I’ll introduce a few more external sampling circles, arranged like +so: + +These are a total of external sampling circles. Each of the external sampling +circles will affect one or more of the internal sampling circles. Here’s an +illustration showing which internal circles each external circle affects: + +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 +0.30 + +For each component of the internal sampling vector, we’ll calculate the maximum +value across the external sampling vector components that affect it, and use +that maximum to perform the contrast enhancement. + +Let’s implement that. I’ll order the internal and external sampling circles +like so: + +0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6 +7 +8 +9 + +We can then define a mapping from the internal circles to the external sampling +circles that affect them: + +const AFFECTING_EXTERNAL_INDICES = [ + [0, 1, 2, 4], + [0, 1, 3, 5], + [2, 4, 6], + [3, 5, 7], + [4, 6, 8, 9], + [5, 7, 8, 9], +]; + +With this, we can change the calculation of maxValue to take the maximum +affecting external value: + +// Before +const maxValue = Math.max(value, externalSamplingVector[i]); + +// After +let maxValue = value; +for (const externalIndex of AFFECTING_EXTERNAL_INDICES[i]) { + maxValue = Math.max(maxValue, externalSamplingVector[externalIndex]); +} + +Now look what happens if the top four external sampling circles are light: it +causes the contrast enhancement to reach into the middle of the sampling +vector, giving us the desired effect: + +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.58 +0.52 +0.31 +0.26 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +0.20 +→ +! +Picked character: ! +Exponent +[47][1 ]141 + +We now smoothly transition from ! -> : -> . — beautiful stuff! + +Let’s see if this change resolves the staircasing effect: + +Oh yeah, looks awesome! We get the desired effect. The boundary is nice and +sharp while not being too jagged. + +Here’s the 3D scene again. The contrast slider now applies both types of +contrast enhancement at the same time — try it out: + +This really enhances the contrast at boundaries, making the image far more +readable! + +Together, the 6D shape vector approach and contrast enhancement techniques have +given us a really nice final ASCII rendering. + +Final words + +This post was really fun to build and write! I hope you enjoyed reading it. + +ASCII rendering is perhaps not the most useful topic to write about, but I +think the idea of using a high-dimensional vector to capture shape is +interesting and could easily be applied to many other problems. There are +parallels to be drawn to [48]word embeddings. + +I started writing this ASCII renderer to see if the idea of using a vector to +capture the shape of characters would work at all. That approach turned out to +work very well, but the initial prototype was terribly slow — I only got +single-digit FPS on my iPhone. To get the ASCII renderer running at a smooth +FPS on mobile required a lot of optimization work. I describe some of that +optimization work in the appendices on [49]character lookup performance and +[50]GPU acceleration below. + +My colleagues, after reading a draft of this post, suggested many alternatives +to the approaches I described in this post. For example, why not make the +sampling vector ? That would capture the shape of T far better — just look how +T’s stem falls between the two sampling circles in each row: + +And yeah, he’s right! A layout would certainly capture it better. They also +suggested many alternative approaches to the contrast enhancement methods I +described, but I won’t explore those in this post. + +It’s really fun how large the solution space to the problem of ASCII rendering +is. There are so, so many approaches and trade-offs to explore. I imagine you +probably thought of a few yourself while reading this post! + +One dimension I intentionally did not explore was using different colors or +lightnesses for the ASCII characters themselves. This is for many reasons, but +the two primary ones are that 1) it would have expanded the scope of this post +too much, and 2) it’s just a different effect, and I personally don’t like the +look. + +At the time of writing these final words, around months have elapsed since I +started working on this post. This has been my longest writing process to date. +Much of that can be explained by the birth of my now -month-old daughter. I’ve +needed to be a lot more intentional about finding time to write — and +disciplined when spending it. I intend to write some smaller posts next. Let’s +see if I manage to stick to that promise. + +Thanks for reading! And huge thanks to [51]Gunnlaugur Þór Briem and [52]Eiríkur +Fannar Torfason for reading and providing feedback on a draft of this post. + +— Alex Harri + +Mailing list + +To be notified of new posts, subscribe to my mailing list. + +[53][ ]Subscribe +Appendix I: Character lookup performance + +Earlier in this post, I showed how to find the best character by finding the +character with the shortest Euclidean distance to our sampling vector. + +function findBestCharacter(inputVector: number[]) { + let bestCharacter = ""; + let bestDistance = Infinity; + + for (const { character, shapeVector } of CHARACTERS) { + const dist = getDistance(shapeVector, inputVector); + if (dist < bestDistance) { + bestDistance = dist; + bestCharacter = character; + } + } + + return bestCharacter; +} + +I tried benchmarking this for input sampling vectors on my MacBook — K +invocations of this function consistently take about ms. If we want to be able +to use this for an animated canvas at FPS, we only have ms to render each +frame. We can use this to get a rough budget for how many lookups we can +perform each frame: + +If we allow ourselves of the performance budget for just lookups, this gives us +a budget of about K characters. Not terrible, but far from great, especially +considering that we’re using numbers from a powerful laptop. A mobile device +might have a times lower budget. Let’s see how we can improve this. + +k-d trees + +-d trees are a data structure that enables nearest-neighbor lookups in +multi-dimensional (-dimensional) space. Their performance [56]degrades in +higher dimensions (e.g. ), but they perform well in dimensions — perfect for +our purpose. + +Internally, -d trees are a binary tree where each node is a -dimensional point. +Each node can be thought to split the -dimensional space in half with a +hyperplane, with the left subtree on one side of the hyperplane and the right +subtree on the other. + +I won’t go into much detail on -d trees here. You’ll have to look at other +resources if you’re interested in learning more. + +One could also look at the [57]hierarchical navigable small worlds (HNSW) +algorithm, which [58]Eiríkur pointed me to. It is used for approximate nearest +neighbor lookups in vector databases, so definitely relevant. + +Let’s see how it performs! We’ll construct a -d tree with our characters and +their associated vectors: + +const kdTree = new KdTree( + CHARACTERS.map(({ character, shapeVector }) => ({ + point: shapeVector, + data: character, + })) +); + +We can now perform nearest-neighbor lookups on the -d tree: + +const result = kdTree.findNearest(samplingVector); + +Running K such lookups takes about ms on my MacBook. That’s about x faster than +the brute-force approach. We can use this to calculate, roughly, the number of +lookups we can perform per frame: + +That’s a lot of lookups per frame, but again, we’re benchmarking on a powerful +machine. This is still not good enough. + +Let’s see how we can eke out even more performance. + +Caching + +An obvious avenue for speeding up lookups is to cache the result: + +function searchCached(samplingVector: number[]) { + const key = generateCacheKey(samplingVector) + + if (cache.has(key)) { + return cache.get(key)!; + } + + const result = search(samplingVector); + cache.set(key, result); + return result; +} + +But how does one generate a cache key for a -dimensional vector? + +Well, one way is to quantize each vector component so that it fits into a set +number of bits and packing those bits into a single number. JavaScript numbers +give us bits to work with, so each vector component gets bits. + +We can quantize a numeric value between and to the range to (the most that bits +can store) like so: + +const BITS = 5; +const RANGE = 2 ** BITS; + +function quantizeTo5Bits(value: number) { + return Math.min(RANGE - 1, Math.floor(value * RANGE)); +} + +Applying a max of RANGE - 1 is done so that a value of exactly is mapped to +instead of . + +We can quantize each of the sampling vector components in this manner and use +bit shifting to pack all of the quantized values into a single number like so: + +const BITS = 5; +const RANGE = 2 ** BITS; + +function generateCacheKey(vector: number[]): number { + let key = 0; + for (let i = 0; i < vector.length; i++) { + const quantized = Math.min(RANGE - 1, Math.floor(vector[i] * RANGE)); + key = (key << BITS) | quantized; + } + return key; +} + +The RANGE is current set to 2 ** 5, but consider how large that makes our key +space. Each vector component is one of possible values. With vector components, +that makes the total number of possible keys , which equals . If the cache were +to be fully saturated, just storing the keys would take GB of memory! I’d also +expect the cache hit rate to be incredibly low if we were to lazily fill the +cache. + +Alright, is too high, but what value should we pick? We can pick any number +under for our range. To help, here’s a table showing the number of possible +keys (and the memory needed to store them) for range values between and : + +Range Number of keys Memory needed to store keys +6 46,656 364 KB +7 117,649 919 KB +8 262,144 2.00 MB +9 531,441 4.05 MB +10 1,000,000 7.63 MB +11 1,771,561 13.52 MB +12 2,985,984 22.78 MB + +There are trade-offs to consider here. As the range gets smaller, the quality +of the results drops. If we pick a range of , for example, the only possible +lightness values are , , , , and . That noticeably affects the quality of +character picks. + +At the same time, if we increase the possible number of keys, we need more +memory to store them. Additionally, the cache hit rate might be very low, +especially when the cache is relatively empty. + +I ended up picking a range of . It’s a large enough range that quality doesn’t +suffer too much while keeping the cache size reasonably low. + +Cached lookups are incredibly fast — fast enough that lookup performance just +isn’t a concern anymore (K lookups take a few ms on my MacBook). And if we +prepopulate the cache, we can expect consistently fast performance, though I +encountered no problems just lazily populating the cache. + +Appendix II: GPU acceleration + +Lookups were not the only performance concern. Just collecting the sampling +vectors (internal and external) turned out to be terribly expensive. + +Just consider the sheer amount of samples that need to be collected. The 3D +scene I’ve been using as an example uses a grid, which equals cells. For each +of those cells, we compute a -dimensional sampling vector and a -dimensional +external sampling vector. That is more than K vector components to compute on +every frame! + +And that’s if we use a sampling quality of . If we increase the sampling +quality, this number just gets bigger. + +Collecting these samples absolutely crushed performance on my iPhone, so I +needed to either collect fewer samples or speed up the collection of samples. +Collecting fewer samples would have meant rendering fewer ASCII characters or +removing the directional contrast enhancement, neither of which was an +appealing solution. + +My initial implementation ran on the CPU, which could only collect one sample +at a time. To speed this up, I moved the work of sampling collection and +applying the contrast enhancement to the GPU. The pipeline for that looks like +so (each of the steps listed is a single shader pass): + + 1. Collect the raw internal sampling vectors into a texture, using the canvas + (image) as the input texture. + 2. Do the same for the external sampling vectors. + 3. Calculate the maximum external value affecting each internal vector + component into a texture. + 4. Apply directional contrast enhancement to each sampling vector component, + using the maximum external values texture. + 5. Calculate the maximum value for each internal sampling vector into a + texture. + 6. Apply global contrast enhancement to each sampling vector component, using + the maximum internal values texture. + +I’m glossing over the details because I could spend a whole other post covering +them, but moving work to the GPU made the renderer many times more performant +than it was when everything ran on the CPU. + +Mailing list + +To be notified of new posts, subscribe to my mailing list. + +[64][ ]Subscribe +[66]Alex Harri + +© 2026 Alex Harri Jónsson + +Links + +[67]GitHub + +[68]LinkedIn + +[69]RSS + +Pages + +[70]Home + +[71]Blog + +[72]About + +[73]Snippets + +The monospace font on this website is [74]MonoLisa, courtesy of [75]FaceType. + + +References: + +[1] https://alexharri.com/ +[2] https://alexharri.com/about +[3] https://alexharri.com/blog +[4] https://chatgpt.com/share/69524279-7564-800f-ae22-a2f433794abe +[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel_shading +[6] https://cognition.ai/ +[7] https://www.ascii-code.com/characters/printable-characters +[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monospaced_font +[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model +[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_luminance#Relative_luminance_and_%22gamma_encoded%22_colorspaces +[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearest-neighbor_interpolation +[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaggies +[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersampling +[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_anti-aliasing +[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_distance +[48] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_embedding +[49] https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering#character-lookup-performance +[50] https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering#appendix-gpu-acceleration +[51] https://www.linkedin.com/in/gunnlaugur-briem/ +[52] https://eirikur.dev/ +[56] https://graphics.stanford.edu/~tpurcell/pubs/search.pdf +[57] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_navigable_small_world +[58] https://eirikur.dev/ +[66] https://alexharri.com/ +[67] https://github.com/alexharri +[68] https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-harri-j%C3%B3nsson-b1273613b/ +[69] https://alexharri.com/rss.xml +[70] https://alexharri.com/ +[71] https://alexharri.com/blog +[72] https://alexharri.com/about +[73] https://alexharri.com/snippets +[74] https://www.monolisa.dev/ +[75] https://www.facetype.org/ diff --git a/static/archive/defector-com-p9as3r.txt b/static/archive/defector-com-p9as3r.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..147d235 --- /dev/null +++ b/static/archive/defector-com-p9as3r.txt @@ -0,0 +1,514 @@ +[1]Skip to Content +[2]Defector home +[3]Defector home +[4]Subscribe[5]Log In +[6][ ] +Menu +[9][ ]Search +Search + • [11]Crosswords + • [12]NFL + • [13]NBA + • [14]MLB + • [15]NHL + • [16]WNBA + • [17]Soccer + • [18]Podcasts + • [19]Arts And Culture + • [20]Politics + + • [21]About Us + • [22]Send Us A Tip (News) + • [23]Send Us A Tip ($) + • [24]Merch Shop + • [25]How To Pitch Defector + • [26]Defector Freelancer Policies + • [27]Crossword Submission Guidelines + • [28]Books By Defectors + • [29]Defector Hall of Fame + • [30]Masthead + • [31]How To Comment On Defector + • [32]RSS Feed + • [33]Terms of Use + • [34]Manage Your Account + +[35]Log In[36]Subscribe + + • [37]Defector Twitch + • [38]Defector Bluesky + +[39]Subscribe to skip adsAdvertisement +Federal Agents arrest a man during an Immigration Enforcement Operation in +Minneapolis, Minneapolis, MN, U.S., January 13, 2026.Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via +Getty Images +[40]Politics + +Fascists Are Pathetic + +[41][Vic] +By [42]David Roth + +9:27 AM EST on January 15, 2026 + + • [43]Share on Bluesky + • [44]Share on Reddit + • [45]Share on WhatsApp + • [46]Share on Email + +[47] +475Comments + +Two days before a shouting cluster of its agents surrounded the car of a +Minneapolis mother and [48]shot her to death last week, ICE was demanding +answers from the Hilton hotel group on Twitter. "Why did your team in +Minneapolis cancel our federal law enforcement officer and agent reservations?" +the government account of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency [49] +asked, repeatedly tagging Hilton's corporate account per the longstanding suite +of best practices among the population of squeakers prone to this kind of +social media crashout. + +The meltdown continued in a subsequent post, which began with the capitalized +sentence "NO ROOM AT THE INN!": "When officers attempted to book rooms using +official government emails and rates, Hilton Hotels maliciously CANCELLED their +reservations," the agency, which [50]had a $28.7 billion budget in 2025, +posted. "This is UNACCEPTABLE. Why is Hilton Hotels siding with murderers and +rapists to deliberately undermine and impede DHS law enforcement from their +mission to enforce our nation’s immigration laws?" The hotel group and the +independently owned hotel in question both [51]apologized later that day, both +taking care to note that they don't condone any kind of discrimination. In the +streets, the horrors continued. + +It is not accurate to say that the current government of the United States +speaks with one voice; there are too many half-sociopath [52]influencers and +podcasters and unstable television personalities scrabbling around in high +positions for there to be anything like that kind of shared purpose, and the +reactionary social media gremlins working under them are all too busy [53] +signaling to their own degenerate micro-communities to get into anything like +harmony. But, one brutal and stupid year into the second Trump administration, +it seems fair to say that the federal government has cohered into a sort of +collective personality. It is maybe more accurate to say that the public-facing +part of the federal government is identifiable at this moment as a specific and +repellent type of American Guy. + +You do not have to know this guy personally to know what he is about; you do +not need to understand what he believes to grasp how dangerous he is or why. +You need only to put some tactical gear and a gaiter on him, dress him up with +whatever weaponry looks toughest, and drop him behind the wheel of a rented +Jeep Wagoneer. Instinct and panic and a gnarled suite of anti-values will do +the work from there; you can't trust him for much, but you can trust that this +guy will point that vehicle's enormous snarling grille at a smaller vehicle +being driven by someone the guy in question has identified as a target. They +would be doing this, or spending hours every day fantasizing about doing it, +even if they had not been told that [54]their right do it now supersedes every +other right in public life. + +This type of person exists in American life—"our neighbors, friends, and loved +ones," in [55]the words of Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin—in sufficient +enough numbers that everyone who does not want to become a character in the +incoherent first-person shooter video game that plays over their every waking +moment knows to avoid them. They are all around us, but contra Sen. Mullin they +are not really our neighbors or friends; they do not quite fit that concept, +and cannot really buy into it. They are self-deputized; their personal defects +make them unstable in a way that leads inexorably to car crashes. + +In his weepy tweet defending their negligible honor and that of the work they +do, Mullin calls them "red-blooded American patriots," and that, too, is both +directionally correct and plainly laughable on the merits. They're American, +all right, and the patriotism they claim—an old, small, ignorant version, but +one that for those reasons nevertheless has some claim on the word—is just one +of many. Before they put on plate carriers and masks and threw themselves into +the dirty business of terrorizing their neighbors and breaking their families, +they were still identifiable as who and what they are and always were—seething, +unappeasable, deliriously and defiantly pig-stupid, and absolutely a threat to +the peace and comfort and flourishing of everyone and anything else. The masks +only make them easier to see. + +Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks at a news conference on +January 7, 2026 in Brownsville, Texas.Kristi Noem doing the classic Standing +Around In Front Of A Bunch Of Uniformed CHUDs maneuver in Texas in January +2026. (Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images) + +There is no disjunction between the political movement that is so frantically +preening and whining and lying [56]on social media and into any camera lens it +can find, and the one prosecuting an aimless, endless, brutish reign of terror +in the hospitals and outside the preschools and across the big-box parking lots +of the greater Twin Cities metropolitan area. They are two sides of the same +coin, or the same side of this particular personality type—baffled, brutish, +plainly terrified and out of control, incapable of self-regulation or basic +self-soothing, never learning a single thing and making as big and violent a +mess as they can on principle. There is no legible strategy in the ICE-led +offensive in Minnesota beyond [57]trying to make the situation worse to see +what might happen, and no sense of what victory might look like; when "get told +to eat shit by dozens of bystanders" and "drive off amid a cloud of tear gas" +represent this big a part of the tactical stack, it becomes easy to doubt that +there actually is any broader goal. + +It's a terror campaign, of course, but the people doing it are themselves so +terrified and so manifestly out of their depth and incapable, and so deeply +lost in their own single-serving fogs of war, that it all becomes recursive. +Its purpose, to the extent one is visible, is to keep going. The original +justification for the surge was [58]an incomprehensible viral video by a +conservative influencer, but it has since become both [59]a campaign of +indiscriminate punishment and cyclical content creation and omnidirectional +retribution—a frantic tantrum unconvincingly dressing itself up as an act of +stern paternal discipline, and a screen-addled movement of hair-trigger +illiterates that has [60]lost the ability to do anything but react, generating +new scenes to react to. + +It could only ever be incoherent, and was always going to be brutal. As a +farcical re-enactment of the lost foreign wars of the last two decades on +American soil, it could not be any other way. For the same reason, it is hard +to know when or how it will end. In Trump's second term, the federal government +has intentionally rid itself of the capacity to do anything but make things +worse; it has quite literally traded Ph.D scientists and dedicated civil +servants for the chance to hastily stand up this expansion team from the +waiver-wire flotsam of the violence worker community. The public money that was +once spent, grudgingly and kludgily, on keeping people alive is now being spent +on this mission and others like it, whose only purpose is to hurt those that +the state has identified as enemies. + +The people carrying this out have been behaving [61]exactly as you might expect +armed sadists to behave after they'd been told that they would be immune from +any future consequences. None of them really seem to understand the mission +they've been given beyond some atavistic mandate to violently pacify and punish +everyone that Doesn't Look Right, to make everything clean and quiet and keep +it that way, to patrol empty streets with their blood up and their guns out +until such time as the threat, which was always just everything and everyone +else, is somehow neutralized. + +And that may well be what the mission actually is. Some people who did not know +anything, and who kept themselves scared all the time, and who held a grudge +against the whole rest of humanity because of how ignorant and frightened that +bigger world's existence made them feel, handed weapons to other people who +felt the same way, and told them to figure it out. All that war and the ways in +which the rot it made weakened various important structures and edifices, the +terrible use reactionary cynics found for that rot, the toxins that invariably +showed up in the groundwater downstream from all that violence—all of these +things made the culture stupid and cruel in new ways, or maybe just in very old +ones. All of that made this awful moment, too. + +The capacity to cry about being treated rudely on social media while carrying +out this open-ended gambit is new, but the instinct to do so wasn't. There is +something deeply, shamefully American about this strike force of out-of-town +shitheads complaining about the customer service it has received from the +people it is trying to oppress, and doing so in language—NO ROOM AT THE INN! +—that stridently references and oafishly misuses one of the foundational +stories of the faith that movement relentlessly claims. A lesson about +humanity, and a whole humane way of seeing the world, shrinks so effortlessly +into a preening, indignant, fundamentally meaningless complaint. + +Minnesota, among other places, is currently in a stalemate between people who +[62]want to live their normal lives without fear of being brutalized or +terrorized or beaten or even killed, and an occupying force that understands +preventing that from happening as more or less the substance and purpose of its +mission, and that is awful. But just because the people doing all that shooting +and crying don't know what they're doing doesn't mean anyone else is as +deceived. Every day, those pissy goons go out looking for trouble, and every +day people who never previously imagined that they would do such a thing tell +them to fuck off, absorb outsized violence for doing so, and resolve to do it +again the next day. + +It's inspiring, this persistence of community and care in the face of a +campaign to annihilate them, and the defiance of people who want to live their +lives against a force that doesn't want anything at all, and all of these small +and vital human things pushing up through the attempt to make those things and +that resistance impossible. But it is also a reminder of how pathetic—how +sincerely and deeply abject, how valueless and lost—this offensive is. There is +all this rude and humble everyday life and all these different types of people +who believe it is meaningful, and then there is this attempt, overseen by an +elite that doesn't believe in anything at all, to replace it with something +dumber, simpler, more demeaning, and more like content. They are going to lose, +and not just because they are outnumbered. + +Recommended + +[63]Sports Highlight Of The Day +[64] + +The Sports Highlight Of The Day Is This ICE Goon Eating Shit + +[65]240Comments +[66]Tom Ley +January 12, 2026 +[67]Ice guy slips and falls +[68]Subscribe to skip adsAdvertisement + +If you liked this blog, please share it! Your referrals help Defector reach new +readers, and those new readers always get a few free blogs before encountering +our paywall. + + • [69]Share on Bluesky + • [70]Share on Reddit + • [71]Share on WhatsApp + • [72]Share on Email + +[73][Vic] +[74]David Roth +[75]@davidjroth.bsky.social + +Editor. Co-host of The Distraction. + +Read More: + + • [76]Actual Existing Trumpism, + • [77]dhs, + • [78]donald trump, + • [79]Fascism, + • [80]ice, + • [81]jd vance, + • [82]kristi noem, + • [83]Minneapolis, + • [84]Trumpism + +Stay in touch + +Sign up for our free newsletter + +[85][ ]Email +Sign up +More from Defector + +[87]NBA +[88] + +Sixers Enact Intentional, Then Unintentional Tribute To The Late Great Dan +McQuade + +[89]157Comments +[90][rat] +[91]Ray Ratto +January 30, 2026 +[92]Tyrese Maxey #0 of the Philadelphia 76ers reacts after the game against the +Sacramento Kings at Xfinity Mobile Arena on January 29, 2026 in Philadelphia, +Pennsylvania. The 76ers defeated the Kings 113-111. +[93]Announcements +[94] + +Dan McQuade, 1983–2026 + +[95]1104Comments +[96][IMG] +[97]Tom Ley +January 28, 2026 +[98]Dan McQuade sits in a blue chair, which is big and fake leather-ish, and +has big arms on it. He has his head resting on his left arm, which is on the +left arm of the chair. He has long light brown hair, a beard cropped to his +face, and I dunno I'd say he's pretty handsome, but I am biased as I am the +subject of the photo. Dan is wearing a red shirt with a grey and white tabby +cat's face on it, with a rose under (and patially covering) the cat. Under that +it says DEFECTOR with the 4 degrees slant logo. He has on blue shorts or pants +(they're shorts, I know they're shorts), they're not jeans but they're not +sweats, like a sort of inbetween situation. There's a hospital admit bracelet +on his left arm. His right arm is on the other arm of the couch. +[99]Cycling +[100] + +Double Kangaroo Chaos Will Reverberate Across The Cycling Season + +[101]58Comments +[102][hea] +[103]Patrick Redford +January 28, 2026 +[104]The peloton rides past a kangaroo road sign during the Tour Down Under UCI +Men's Cycling in Adelaide on January 25, 2026. +[105]Podcasts +[106] + +How Do You Make A Podcast When The World Is On Fire? + +[107]4Comments +[108]A headshot of Jae Towle Vieira +[109]Jae Towle Vieira +January 28, 2026 +[110][2025_NormalGossip_LogoArt_16_9_Loc] +[111]NFL +[112] + +Bill Belichick Becomes The Target Of Someone Else’s Pettiness, For A Change + +[113]158Comments +[114][rat] +[115]Ray Ratto +January 28, 2026 +[116]Head coach Bill Belichick of the North Carolina Tar Heels gives a thumbs +up during the ACC Football Kickoff at Hilton Charlotte Uptown on July 24, 2025 +in Charlotte, North Carolina. He looks real weird doing it. +[117]NFL +[118] + +Heartwarming: Miserable Man Frustrated In Ultimately Insignificant Way + +[119]252Comments +[120][Vic] +[121]David Roth +January 28, 2026 +[122]New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick announces he is leaving the +team during a press conference at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, +Massachusetts, on January 11, 2024. +[123]See all posts +[124]Subscribe to skip adsAdvertisementClose +[126]Defector home +[127]Defector home + +This is Defector, a new sports blog and media company. We made this place +together, we own it together, we run it together. 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https://www.404media.co/hilton-hotel-that-refused-dhs-reservations-backpedals/ +[52] https://defector.com/kingdom-of-the-biters +[53] https://theintercept.com/2026/01/13/dhs-ice-white-nationalist-neo-nazi/ +[54] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/stephen-miller-said-ice-officers-181934483.html +[55] https://x.com/SenMullin/status/2008994615454748933 +[56] https://defector.com/jd-vance-is-a-hog-thatll-eat-any-slop +[57] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/former-ice-workers-trump-violence-by-design-renee-good/ +[58] https://www.cjr.org/laurels-and-darts/ice-minnesota-fraud-somali-community-nick-shirley-viral-debunked-video-dhs-surge.php +[59] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hundreds-federal-agents-are-headed-minnesota-noem-says-rcna253547 +[60] https://www.theverge.com/tech/856948/nick-shirley-minnesota-daycare-fraud-influencer-media-cycle +[61] https://www.propublica.org/article/videos-ice-dhs-immigration-agents-using-chokeholds-citizens +[62] 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+[109] https://defector.com/author/jae-towle-vieira +[110] https://defector.com/how-do-you-make-a-podcast-when-the-world-is-on-fire +[111] https://defector.com/category/nfl +[112] https://defector.com/bill-belichick-becomes-the-target-of-someone-elses-pettiness-for-a-change +[113] https://defector.com/bill-belichick-becomes-the-target-of-someone-elses-pettiness-for-a-change#coral_thread +[114] https://defector.com/author/ray-ratto +[115] https://defector.com/author/ray-ratto +[116] https://defector.com/bill-belichick-becomes-the-target-of-someone-elses-pettiness-for-a-change +[117] https://defector.com/category/nfl +[118] https://defector.com/heartwarming-miserable-man-frustrated-in-ultimately-insignificant-way +[119] https://defector.com/heartwarming-miserable-man-frustrated-in-ultimately-insignificant-way#coral_thread +[120] https://defector.com/author/david-roth +[121] https://defector.com/author/david-roth +[122] 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+Subscribe for $0 + + • [5]Email + • [6]RSS feed + • [7](What is a feed?) + +Unoffice Hours + + • [8]Book a call + • [9](What is this?) + +a.k.a. genmon + + • [10]Bluesky + • [11]X/Twitter + • [12]Insta + • [13]Mastodon + • [14]LinkedIn + +Building the AI clock + + • [15]Check out Poem/1 + +Singing the gospel of collective efficacy + +20.01, Friday 30 Jan 2026 [16]Link to this post + +If I got to determine the school curriculum, I would be optimising for +collective efficacy. + +So I live in a gentrified but still mixed neighbourhood in London (we’re the +newbies at just under a decade) and we have an active WhatsApp group. + +Recently there was a cold snap and a road nearby iced over – it was in the +shade and cyclists kept on wiping out on it. For some reason the council didn’t +come and salt it. + +Somebody went out and created a sign on a weighted chair so it didn’t blow +away. And this is a small thing but I LOVE that I live somewhere there is a +shared belief that (a) our neighbourhood is worth spending effort on, and (b) +you can just do things. + +Similarly we all love when the swifts visit (beautiful birds), so somebody +started a group to get swift nest boxes made and installed collectively, then +applied for subsidy funding, then got everyone to chip in such that people who +couldn’t afford it could have their boxes paid for, and now suddenly we’re all +writing to MPs and following the legislation to include swift nesting sites in +new build houses. Etc. + +It’s called collective efficacy, the belief that you can make a difference by +acting together. + +(People who have heard of Greta Thunberg tend to [17]have a stronger sense of +collective efficacy (2021).) + +It’s so heartening. + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +You can just do things + +That phrase was a Twitter thing for a while, and I haven’t done the archaeology +on the phrase but there’s this blog post by Milan Cvitkovic from 2020: [18] +Things you’re allowed to do. + +e.g. + + • `Say I don’t know' + • `Tape over annoying LED lights' + • `Buy goods/services from your friends' + +I read down the list saying to myself, yeah duh of course, to almost every +single one, then hit certain ones and was like – oh yeah, I can just do that. + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +I think collective efficacy is maybe 50% taking off the blinkers and giving +yourself (as a group) permission to do things. + +But it’s also 50% belief that it’s worth acting at all. + +And that belief is founded part in care, and part in faith that what you are +doing can actually make a difference. + +For instance: + +A lot of my belief in the power of government comes from the fact that, back in +the day, London’s tech scene was not all that. So in 2009 I worked with +Georgina Voss to figure out the gap, then in 2010 bizarrely got invited on a +trade mission to India with the Prime Minister and got the opportunity to make +the case about east London to them, and based on that No. 10 launched Tech City +(which we had named on the plane), and that acted as a catalyst on the work +that everyone was already doing to get the cluster going, and then we were off +to the races. WIRED magazine wrote it up in 2019: [19]The story of London’s +tech scene, as told by those who built it (paywall-busting link). + +So I had that experience and now I believe that, if I can find the right ask, +there’s always the possibility to make things better. + +That’s a rare experience. I’m very lucky. + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +ALTHOUGH. + +Should we believe in luck? + +Psychologist Richard Wiseman, [20]The Luck Factor (2003, PDF): + + I gave both [self-identified] lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and + asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. + On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the + photographs whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the + second page of the newspaper contained the message “Stop counting - There + are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” + +`Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles.' + + They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky + decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling + prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that + transforms bad luck into good. + +I insist that people are not lucky nor unlucky. Maybe some amount of luck is +habit? + +You can just be lucky? + +(Well, not absolutely, privilege is big, but maybe let’s recalibrate luck from +believing it is entirely random, that’s what I’m saying.) + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +When I was a kid I used to play these unforgivingly impossible video games – +that’s what home video games were like then. No open world play, multiple ways +to win, or adaptive difficulty. Just pixel-precise platform jumps and timing. + +Yet you always knew that there was a way onto the next screen, however long it +took. + +It taught a kind of stubborn optimism. + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +Or, in another context, `No fate but what we make.' + +Same same. + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +All of which makes me ask: + +Could we invent free-to-plan mobile games which train luckiness? + +Are there games for classrooms that would cement a faith in collective efficacy +in kids? + +Or maybe it’s proof by demonstration. + +I’m going into my kid’s school in a couple of weeks to show the class photos of +what it looks like inside factories. The stuff around us was made by people +like us; it’s not divine in origin; factories are just rooms. + +I have faith that - somehow - at some point down the line - this act will help. + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social +media. [21]Here’s the link. Thanks, —Matt. + + + +Most recent posts + + • Singing the gospel of collective efficacy 30 Jan 2026 (This post) + • [22]Do today’s work today 23 Jan 2026 + • [23]The natural home for AI agents is your Reminders app 15 Jan 2026 + • [24]Real like ghosts or real like celebrities? 9 Jan 2026 + • [25]My top posts in 2025 3 Jan 2026 + • [26]More scraps from my notes file 26 Dec 2025 + • [27]Filtered for conspiracy theories 19 Dec 2025 + • [28]My new fave thing to go to is algoraves 11 Dec 2025 + • [29]My mental model of the AI race 5 Dec 2025 + • [30]Context plumbing 29 Nov 2025 + • [31]Spinning up a new thing: Inanimate 19 Nov 2025 + • [32]3 books with Samuel Arbesman 14 Nov 2025 + +Continue reading: [33]All in 2025 + +streak New posts for 305 consecutive weeks (see: [34]blogging tips) + +New? Start here: [35]Best of 2025 (also [36]2024, [37]2023, [38]2022, [39]2021, +[40]2020) +Or explore the archives: [41]On this day + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +Archive + + • [42]2026 5 posts + • [43]2025 61 posts + • [44]2024 60 posts + • [45]2023 68 posts + • [46]2022 96 posts + • [47]2021 128 posts + • [48]2020 118 posts + • [49]2019 23 posts + • [50]2018 47 posts + • [51]2017 22 posts + • [52]2016 48 posts + • [53]2015 88 posts + • [54]2014 30 posts + • [55]2013 6 posts + • [56]2012 27 posts + • [57]2011 76 posts + • [58]2010 2 posts + • [59]2009 2 posts + • [60]2008 59 posts + • [61]2007 20 posts + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ +[62][ ] Search +Since February 2000. Copyright © 2026 Matt Webb. + +p.s. here’s [70]my blogroll and the [71]colophon. + + +References: + +[1] https://interconnected.org/home/ +[2] https://interconnected.org/ +[3] https://interconnected.org/home/2026/01/30/efficacy#archive +[4] https://www.actsnotfacts.com/ +[5] https://buttondown.com/genmon +[6] https://interconnected.org/home/feed +[7] https://aboutfeeds.com/ +[8] https://calendly.com/mwie/30min +[9] https://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/24/unoffice_hours +[10] https://bsky.app/profile/genmon.org +[11] https://x.com/genmon +[12] https://www.instagram.com/genmon/ +[13] https://mastodon.social/@genmon +[14] https://www.linkedin.com/in/genmon/ +[15] https://poem.town/ +[16] https://interconnected.org/home/2026/01/30/efficacy +[17] https://interconnected.org/home/2021/04/08/efficacy +[18] https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/ +[19] https://archive.ph/GJrTT +[20] http://richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf +[21] https://interconnected.org/home/2026/01/30/efficacy +[22] https://interconnected.org/home/2026/01/23/umpa +[23] https://interconnected.org/home/2026/01/15/reminders +[24] https://interconnected.org/home/2026/01/09/real +[25] https://interconnected.org/home/2026/01/03/top-posts +[26] https://interconnected.org/home/2025/12/26/scraps +[27] https://interconnected.org/home/2025/12/19/filtered +[28] https://interconnected.org/home/2025/12/11/live +[29] https://interconnected.org/home/2025/12/05/training +[30] https://interconnected.org/home/2025/11/28/plumbing +[31] https://interconnected.org/home/2025/11/19/inanimate +[32] https://interconnected.org/home/2025/11/14/arbesman +[33] https://interconnected.org/home/2025 +[34] https://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/10/streak +[35] https://interconnected.org/home/2026/01/03/top-posts +[36] https://interconnected.org/home/2024/12/30/top-posts +[37] https://interconnected.org/home/2023/12/22/top-posts +[38] https://interconnected.org/home/2022/12/21/top_posts +[39] https://interconnected.org/home/2021/12/23/top_posts +[40] https://interconnected.org/home/2020/12/17/top_posts +[41] https://interconnected.org/home/on-this-day +[42] https://interconnected.org/home/2026 +[43] https://interconnected.org/home/2025 +[44] https://interconnected.org/home/2024 +[45] https://interconnected.org/home/2023 +[46] https://interconnected.org/home/2022 +[47] https://interconnected.org/home/2021 +[48] https://interconnected.org/home/2020 +[49] https://interconnected.org/home/2019 +[50] https://interconnected.org/home/2018 +[51] https://interconnected.org/home/2017 +[52] https://interconnected.org/home/2016 +[53] https://interconnected.org/home/2015 +[54] https://interconnected.org/home/2014 +[55] https://interconnected.org/home/2013 +[56] https://interconnected.org/home/2012 +[57] https://interconnected.org/home/2011 +[58] https://interconnected.org/home/2010 +[59] https://interconnected.org/home/2009 +[60] https://interconnected.org/home/2008 +[61] https://interconnected.org/home/2007 +[70] https://interconnected.org/home/blogroll +[71] https://interconnected.org/home/2024/10/28/colophon diff --git a/static/archive/javascriptweekly-com-bszyss.txt b/static/archive/javascriptweekly-com-bszyss.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0875f11 --- /dev/null +++ b/static/archive/javascriptweekly-com-bszyss.txt @@ -0,0 +1,307 @@ +[1]JavaScript Weekly +[2]Archives| [3]Latest| [4]RSS +[5][ ]Subscribe now » +Easy to unsubscribe at any time. Your e-mail address [7]is safe — here's [8]our +privacy policy. +[10]« Prev +[11]Next » + +#​769 — January 20, 2026 [12]Read on the Web + + +Together with  [13]Mescius + + +JavaScript Weekly + +[14][wcs3cbapnd4mar9cocya] +[15]jQuery 4.0 Released — 20 years on from its original release, the +ever-popular ([16]in terms of actual usage) library reaches 4.0 with a +migration to ES modules (compatible with modern build tools) along with +dropping support for IE 10 and older. With jQuery being a popular guest in our +newsletters in the early years, it’s fantastic to see it pop back for a +quick visit. + +Timmy Willison + +💡 If you're using jQuery, you'll find [17]jQuery Migrate, an official tool to +help you upgrade, useful. jQuery in 2026 is a somewhat legacy choice, though, +and [18]you might not need jQuery at all.. + +[19][dceb6cf2] + +[20]Add Excel-like Spreadsheet Functionality to Your JavaScript Apps — SpreadJS +is the industry-leading JavaScript spreadsheet for adding advanced spreadsheet +features to your enterprise apps. Build finance, analysis, budget, and other +apps. Excel I/O, 500+ calc functions, tables, charts, and more. [21]View +demos now. + +SpreadJS from MESCIUS inc sponsor + +[22]Astro is Joining Cloudflare — Big news in the Web framework space as the +team behind [23]the popular Astro framework ([24]the beta of v6.0 is now +available) is headed to Cloudflare. Few major frameworks are now not under the +wing of a larger entity. + +Schott and Irvine-Broque + +IN BRIEF: + + • 🕒 [25]Temporal Playground is an online sandbox for playing around with the + [26]Temporal API. + + • Svelte has released patches for [27]five vulnerabilities affecting the + Svelte ecosystem. + + • 🤖 Ryan Dahl, creator of both Node.js and Deno, [28]says on X that "the era + of humans writing code is over" and "That's not to say SWEs don't have work + to do, but writing syntax directly is not it." I hope not, but these are + interesting times! + +RELEASES: + + • [29]Electron 40.0 – The popular cross-platform desktop app framework + upgrades to Chromium 144, V8 14.4, and Node 24.11.1. + + • [30]Node.js v25.4.0 (Current) – require(esm) is now marked as stable. + + • [31]React Native Windows 0.81, [32]Aurelia 2 RC, [33]Deno 2.6.5 + +📖  Articles and Videos + +[34][jgxwxup4zgn1lvkdjife] +[35]ASCII Characters Are Not Pixels: A Deep Dive Into ASCII Rendering — Alex +digs deep into getting ASCII-based graphics rendering just right with +JavaScript, complete with examples of the algorithms used and numerous demos. +The neatest technical blog post I’ve seen so far this year. + +Alex Harri + +[36]JavaScript Now a First-Class Citizen in Aspire — [37]Aspire is a Microsoft +framework for orchestrating the deployment of distributed apps. Originally just +for .NET, [38]Aspire 13 now makes JavaScript a first-class citizen, so you can +run Vite and full-stack JS apps with service discovery, telemetry, and +production-ready containers. + +Microsoft + +[39]Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x +faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports +Vitest, jest, Karma, Jasmine, and more. + +Wallaby Team sponsor + +[40]Introducing the Element — Chrome 144 introduces a new + element for requesting user location data, moving away from a +JavaScript-triggered prompt. + +Viana, Le, Steiner + +📄 [41]Bootstrapping Bun – “My journey running the build system for Bun … +without relying on any of its usual binary dependencies — namely itself.” +Bradley Walters + +📄 [42]Building a Scroll-Driven Dual-Wave Text Animation with GSAP Valentin +Descombes + +📄 [43]How the Electron Team Improved Window Resize Behavior Niklas Wenzel + +📄 [44]How to Learn to Build Apps in 2026 Eric Elliott + +🛠 Code & Tools + +[45][sp5w3urjw73n3rnjqoai] +[46]Starry Night 3.9: GitHub-Like Syntax Highlighting — GitHub’s own syntax +highlighter isn’t open source, but this library is a powerful alternative that +tries to get as close as it can, with support for hundreds of languages. I’ve +[47]put a basic Web demo here to show off how to use it on the Web. + +Titus Wormer + +[48]Extension.js 3: Browser Extension Development Framework — Create +cross-browser extensions without manual build configuration and develop, build, +and preview across browsers with a unified workflow. [49]GitHub repo. + +Cezar Augusto et al. + +[50]Easily Add Image Editing to your Web App — Import pintura, give it an +image, and instantly get features like cropping, rotating, and annotation. [51] +Try for free today. + +Pintura sponsor + +[52]React Aria: Adobe's World-Class React Components — React Aria has a +fantastic new site and all-new documentation that really sells the entire +experience, complete with interactive CSS and Tailwind examples to get started +quickly. + +Adobe + +[53]localspace: Modern localForage-Compatible Storage Toolkit — [54]localForage +is/was a popular storage library that wrapped various browser storage APIs with +a simple, localStorage-like API. It hasn’t been updated for years, though, and +“localspace exists to bridge that gap”. + +Michael Lin + + • ⭐ [55]p5.js v2.2 – The powerful JavaScript visual/creative coding toolkit + now includes WebGPU mode as a core feature ([56]explained well here and + [57]here). + + • 🎥 [58]Mediabunny 1.29.0 – The TypeScript media toolkit adds support for + reading and writing MPEG Transport Stream (.ts) files. [59]Demo site. + + • [60]Prettier 3.8 – The opinionated code formatter adds full support for + [61]Angular 21.1 which was released last week. + + • [62]LogTape 2.0 – Simple logging library for all major JS runtimes. [63] + Changelog. + + • ☎︎ [64]vue-tel-input 9.6 – Telephone number input for Vue. ([65]Demo.) + + • [66]d3-3d 2.0 – D3-powered visualizations, but projected into 3D. + + • [67]Convert 6.0 – Small, fast library for type-safe unit conversions. + + • [68]SuperDiff 4.0 – Rich readable diffs for arrays and objects. + + • [69]Jasmine 6.0 – Long-standing JavaScript BDD framework. + + +📰 Classifieds + +🔑 [70]Add API key auth to any JS backend. Clerk handles generation, hashing, +scopes, and instant revocation. [71]Free during public beta. + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +Notion, Dropbox and LaunchDarkly have switched to [72]Meticulous for frontend +tests that provide near-exhaustive coverage with zero developer effort. [73] +Find out why. + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +🛠️ Auth0 for AI Agents provides a foundation for developers to build AI agents +without compromising security or innovation. [74]Start building. + + + +📢  Elsewhere in the ecosystem + +Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape: + +[75][ry47g3jm8zcchbvpn3ga] + • 🔎 The VS Code team has put together a fascinating blog post about [76]how + they implemented a new, fast client-side docs search system for the VS Code + site using Rust and WebAssembly. You can use their [77]docfind engine for + yourself too, and [78]there's a live demo here showing off how fast it is + over an index of 50,000 news articles. + + • 📊 HTTP Archive has released its [79]latest Web Almanac for 2025 packed with + raw stats, trends, and observations about the state of the Web over the + past year, covering areas like [80]WebAssembly, [81]performance, and + ever-increasing [82]page weight. + + • A developer makes [83]a prediction that Microsoft will eventually + discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows-themed Linux distribution. + + • Things are [84]not looking good for the MySQL project. + + • [85]The State of WebAssembly in 2025 and 2026. + + +[86]« Prev +[87]Next » +[88][ ]Subscribe now » +Easy to unsubscribe at any time. Your e-mail address [90]is safe — here's [91] +our privacy policy. +[web] + +References: + +[1] https://javascriptweekly.com/ +[2] https://javascriptweekly.com/issues +[3] https://javascriptweekly.com/latest +[4] https://javascriptweekly.com/rss/ +[7] https://cooperpress.com/spam.html +[8] https://cooperpress.com/legal/privacy/ +[10] https://javascriptweekly.com/issues/768 +[11] https://javascriptweekly.com/issues/770 +[12] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179441/web +[13] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179442/web +[14] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179443/web +[15] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179443/web +[16] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179444/web +[17] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179445/web +[18] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179446/web +[19] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179442/web +[20] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179442/web +[21] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179442/web +[22] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179447/web +[23] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179448/web +[24] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179449/web +[25] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179450/web +[26] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179451/web +[27] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179452/web +[28] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179453/web +[29] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179454/web +[30] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179455/web +[31] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179456/web +[32] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179457/web +[33] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179458/web +[34] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179459/web +[35] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179459/web +[36] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179460/web +[37] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179461/web +[38] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179462/web +[39] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179463/web +[40] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179464/web +[41] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179465/web +[42] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179466/web +[43] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179505/web +[44] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179467/web +[45] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179468/web +[46] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179468/web +[47] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179469/web +[48] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179470/web +[49] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179471/web +[50] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179472/web +[51] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179472/web +[52] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179473/web +[53] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179474/web +[54] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179475/web +[55] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179476/web +[56] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179477/web +[57] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179478/web +[58] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179479/web +[59] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179480/web +[60] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179481/web +[61] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179482/web +[62] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179483/web +[63] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179484/web +[64] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179485/web +[65] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179486/web +[66] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179487/web +[67] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179488/web +[68] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179489/web +[69] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179490/web +[70] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179491/web +[71] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179491/web +[72] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179492/web +[73] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179492/web +[74] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179493/web +[75] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179494/web +[76] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179494/web +[77] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179495/web +[78] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179496/web +[79] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179497/web +[80] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179498/web +[81] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179499/web +[82] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179500/web +[83] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179501/web +[84] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179502/web +[85] https://javascriptweekly.com/link/179503/web +[86] https://javascriptweekly.com/issues/768 +[87] https://javascriptweekly.com/issues/770 +[90] https://cooperpress.com/spam.html +[91] https://cooperpress.com/legal/privacy/ diff --git a/static/archive/milan-cvitkovic-net-aqgldo.txt b/static/archive/milan-cvitkovic-net-aqgldo.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6f7438a --- /dev/null +++ b/static/archive/milan-cvitkovic-net-aqgldo.txt @@ -0,0 +1,501 @@ + • [1]Writing + + • [2]Science + + • [3]About + +Things you're allowed to do + +December 13, 2020, updated January 9, 2023 + +This is a list of things you’re allowed to do that you thought you weren’t, or +didn’t even know you could. + +I haven’t tried everything on this list, mainly due to cost. But you’d be +surprised how cheap most of the things on this list are (especially the free +ones). + +Note that you can replace “hire” or “buy” with “barter for” or “find a DIY +guide to” nearly everywhere below. E.g. you can clean the bathroom in exchange +for your housemate doing a couple hours’ research for you. + +Learning and decision making + + • Hire a researcher or expert consultant + □ I hired a researcher ([4]Elizabeth Van Nostrand, whom you can and + should [5]hire too) to help write this very post, which is largely + about how to hire people to do things! + □ They can: + ☆ Help validate whether a crazy idea is possible + ☆ Do [6]epistemic spot checks of your work + ☆ Map the landscape of opinions on a topic + ☆ Write literature surveys + ☆ Find people worth talking to about a potential topic and writing + briefs about them + ☆ Opposition or market research + ☆ Find options for big purchases like houses or insurance + ☆ Compile datasets + ☆ Find un-Googleable things + □ To find one: + ☆ Look for books or scholarly articles on the topic, and email the + author + ○ Graduate students are especially good, and often know more than + the “experts” + ○ If you find someone genuinely interested in what you’re working + on, you might be able to collaborate and not pay + ☆ Look for interested individuals in the long tail of blogs + ○ E.g. by Google searching with "site: medium.com" and finding + the authors + ☆ Use a matchmaking service (see [7]Appendix) + ☆ Search through professional organizations directories (e.g. Bar + Association, American Academy of Pediatrics) + ☆ Google the topic + + ○ “blog” + ○ “podcast” + ○ “expert witness” + ○ “book” + ○ “consultant” + ○ “reddit” + □ What do I pay them? + ☆ Some post their prices online + ☆ If you’re hiring a grad student you can pay them at or above their + school’s graduate student stipend, which you can Google. + ☆ [8]Make sure they get something out of the project (and other tips) + • [9]Ask obvious questions + • Ask questions online + □ You know those answers you enjoy reading on Stack Exchange, Reddit, + Quora, etc.? Someone had to ask those questions. It can be you. + □ If you’re embarrassed by the question, it’s easy to be anonymous + • Run surveys + □ Twitter + ☆ Or ask someone with a larger following to do it + □ Google Surveys + □ Amazon Mechanical Turk + • Buy advertisements, [10]especially in legacy media + • Run [11]genuine randomized control trials on yourself + • Buy research or data + □ See [12]Appendix, [13]here, or [14]here + □ Or find it on [15]SciHub or [16]Libgen + • Hire someone to pentest/doxx you + □ Or put out a bounty for it, like [17]Gwern used to + • Hire a graphic designer to turn your appalling sketches into beautiful + diagrams or slides + • Host small gatherings or conferences on topics you care about + □ These are much easier to set up than you’d think, especially in the age + of Zoom + • Hire a tutor + □ [18]Language tutors are surprisingly cheap and better than any app + □ [19]Wyzant and many other sites exist for general tutoring + □ For niche tutoring you can try general freelance sites like [20]Fiverr + or [21]Upwork + □ Services like [22]Sharpest Minds exist for professional training + • [23]Dissect a cadaver (even as a non-medical student) + • Pick a spot on the map that simply seems strange and just go there. (HT + Michael Nielsen) + • Hire someone just as an excuse to make yourself complete a project + □ Sure you could proofread your own document. But if you hire a + proofreader, you have to actually deliver them something at some point. + +Interpersonal + + • Say “I don’t know” or “I don’t have an opinion” when you don’t + • Not tell white lies + □ You can be nice and tell the truth at the same time. + □ Especially to kids when they annoy you. + • Don’t drink (alcohol), even when you’re expected to + • Buy goods/services from your friends + □ It’s not weird unless you make it weird + □ Everyone knows some starving artists and needs to buy holiday gifts + □ Doesn’t apply to every service obviously: don’t take out loans from + your friends + • Travel to friends just to visit them + • Move close to friends + • Live in multiple places with multiple people + □ Rent spare rooms or couches part-time in multiple homes + □ Arrange your own timeshare system with friends + ☆ E.g. a group of nine friends can rent three three-bedroom + apartments in three cities + ☆ This also gives you flexibility over which jurisdiction you’re + taxed in + • Be a nomad + • Ask your acquaintances, “Hey, I want to leave my house more, are there any + cool events you’re going to soon?” (HT Sasha Chapin) + • Actively try to make yourself a better conversation partner + □ Via [24]Sasha Chapin + □ Via [25]Chana Messinger + □ Via [26]Adam Mastroianni + • Start a blog or substack so you can say “I’m a writer” without lying. Then + start conversations with strangers by saying “Hi, I’m a writer doing a + piece about . Can I ask you a few + questions?” + □ This is especially handy when traveling or at a restaurant. + • Romance + □ Ask people out on dates + □ Ask your friends to set you up + □ Hire a matchmaker + □ Buy premium versions of dating apps + □ Get couples therapy + • Give to charity + □ You can, to the best of our knowledge, [27]save someone’s (statistical) + life with not that much money. This is a big deal. + +Support and accountability + + • Hire a coach + □ For your professional area + ☆ [28]An Atul Gawande article on the subject + ☆ [29]On clicker training + □ Personal trainer + □ Nutritionist + □ Meditation guide + • Visit a physical therapist + • Buy task-specific devices that prevent multitasking + □ Kindle + □ Freewrite Traveller + □ Dedicated music players + □ Dedicated notebooks for specific purposes (day planner, exercise log, + etc.) + • Engage a human productivity monitor + □ I know two people who have hired people to sit next to them or + frequently contact them to keep them on-task + □ Examples: [30]focusmate.com and [31]coding-pal.com + +Making the most of your resources + + • First, figure out [32]how much your time is really worth to you, and then + act/spend accordingly + • Modify your stuff + □ Tape over annoying LED lights + □ Remove logos ([33]example) + □ Write in books + □ Rip off tags + □ Rotate your monitor to portrait + • Repair your stuff, or get it repaired + □ Shoes + □ Clothes + □ Luggage and [34]outdoor gear + □ Furniture + □ Car + ☆ You can buy at-home car care + • Grocery delivery + • Cleaning services + □ Can be regular or just when you need a big spring clean + □ Don’t forget carpet cleaning, vent cleaning, and air filter replacement + • Laundry service + • Nannies over daycare + • Write on a post-it note affixed to a greeting card rather than on the + greeting card itself, so the recipient can throw away the post-it and reuse + your card + □ Employ similar logic for any disposable/consumable item + • Ask for free upgrades or coupons + □ At checkout you can just ask “Do you have any coupons I can apply to + this?” + • Treat fines like payments + □ E.g. park illegally and let yourself think of the (expected value of + the) fine as a parking fee + □ Obviously don’t break rules that matter like blocking a fire exit + • [35]Contest unjust fines + □ [36]DoNotPay offers lots of services like this, like unsubscribing you + from services or sending faxes digitally + • Don’t pay, or renegotiate, bills + □ [37]Example with hospital bills + • Let the credit cards on recurring bills expire + • Call/email executives at company to complain about things + □ E.g. using [38]RocketReach + • Telemedicine + • Surgery for appearance or comfort + • At-home vet care + • Enroll [39]yourself (or [40]your pet) in a clinical trial or research study + • Generate your own audiobooks + • Generate your own ebooks + □ [41]1dollarscan.com + • Get verbal things written down + □ [42]transcribeme.com + □ [43]otter.ai + • Personal assistant services (or a real PA if you can afford it) + □ [44]Magic, [45]TaskRabbit, [46]Fancy Hands, and similar services can + approximate many of these. There are also more serious services like + [47]Double. + □ Manage email + □ Helping you move + □ Getting visas and arranging travel + □ Stand in line for you + □ Errands + □ Filing paperwork + • Hire a personal stylist + • And if you grew up in a thrifty family, like me: + □ Paying for parking in convenient location + □ Hotels where you can sleep comfortably + □ Non-public transportation, especially when traveling + □ Buying comfortable mattress, shoes, etc. + □ Buying clothes for appearance or comfort instead of just the lowest + price + □ Bottled water when you’re thirsty + ☆ And in general fulfilling any bodily need for < $5 (restrooms, + buying a hat when you forgot yours, etc.) + □ Buy your way out of advertising on e.g. Spotify or YouTube + □ Actually turn the heat/AC on + ☆ And in general, [48]being willing to spend a few minutes to fix + small annoyances + ○ You could even get someone to observe you to help figure this + out + ☆ Seriously, just put 3-IN-ONE oil on that squeaky hinge already + +Professional + + • Ignore what’s on the jobs page and directly pitch someone at a company on + hiring you + □ The jobs page is always out-of-date anyway + □ Figure out what their needs are before you make your pitch + • Negotiate for better terms in your job offer + □ Easier than asking for a raise - you have more leverage + □ You can ask for a signing bonus equal to the cost of exercising all + your options, which shows commitment to the company + □ Propose a longer vesting schedule to demonstrate commitment + • Ask for a raise + • Ask to waive admission or graduation requirements + • Drop out/quit your job + □ Or go on leave from your job/school until they kick you out. They often + won’t. + • Live off your savings while trying something new + • If you can’t live off your savings, get a grant + □ [49]Emergent Ventures + □ [50]ACX Grants + □ Kickstarter + □ These days there are always new microgrant programs starting, [51] + here’s one list + • Work for yourself + □ Coaching, contracting, etc. + • [52]Cold contact people + □ Yes, even famous people. Or anyone who wrote something you like. Just + make sure you have something to say or a good question. + • [53]Write forwardable emails + • [54]Follow up many times + □ You won’t make people mad if you’re polite. + • Approach a person or group you admire and ask whether they want to cofound + something with you + □ “Here’s my story, my goal is to build a company/nonprofit/whatever in + this space, maybe I can help you with X role.” + • Propose that a person, group, or company contract-to-hire you + □ Even if you want a cofounder role, this can be done well + • Learn how professionals email by [55]reading leaked emails. + • Use contract-to-hire + □ Even for CEO-level roles, this can be done well + • As mentioned above, buy [56]research or data, e.g. for compensation + • Market-test a mere idea by (1) setting up a landing page with an interest + form and (2) buying a cheap social media ad campaign. (HT [57]@daytimeskye) + • Merge with your competitors, a la PayPal + • Work in public + □ Or mostly in public, a la SpaceX who livestreams everything + • Sell to unusual markets + □ ZetrOZ was building a medical device, but started by selling to olympic + horse teams, then olympic human athletes + □ Some biotech companies start in pets + • Charge more + • Write interviews with yourself and send them to journalists (HT Tom Kalil) + • Fly to people for in-person meetings/visits to demonstrate seriousness + • In general, just ask for things, even if you’ve never heard someone ask for + them + □ It’s okay if the things are crazy. You can always mollify afterward by + saying “I know that’s a crazy thing to ask for, but I have a rule that + I always ask.” + +Related, Probably Better Lists + + • Dwarkesh Patel’s [58]list of “barbell strategies” + • Katja Grace’s [59]How to trade money and time + • Sam Bowman’s [60]Things I Recommend You Buy and Use + • Rob Wiblin [61]channeling Sam + • Arden Koehler [62]channeling Rob + • Arden Koehler [63]channeling herself + • Sam Bowman [64]channeling himself + • [65]Estimated hourly costs of buying free time (see comments) + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +Thanks to [66]Gwern, [67]Stephen Malina, [68]Alexey Guzey, [69]Elliot Jin, [70] +iandanforth, [71]Joshua M. Clulow, [72]Kay, [73]zoba, [74]ryandrake, a guy I +can’t name who offers “personal assistant concierge services for high-net-worth +families,” and [75]Elizabeth Van Nostrand for some of the ideas above. + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ + +Appendix: Sources of experts + + Name Type Comments Target URL + Audience +Expertise Academics to comment on many Journalists [76] +Finder subjects link +Women’s Media Women only, focuses on [77] +Center current events and politics Journalists link +SheSource +National +Association of Seems like a low [78] +Personal Financial only bar to entry Journalists link +Financial +Advisors + Owned by PR firm, +ProfNet Wide range of experts presumably works Journalists [79] + for experts more link + than you + Presumably biased +Coursera Academics from top schools towards people who Journalists [80] +Expert Network only have made Coursera link + courses + Curated experts from +ExpertFile universities, institutions, Journalists [81] + think tanks, associations, link + companies and other sources + Aimed mostly at professional [82] +GURU expertise (Sales, Marketing, Businesses link + Eng, etc.) +Amber Biology Biologists only Science [83] + projects? link +Help a Requires +Reporter Out affiliation with a Journalists [84] +(HARO) highly ranked link + website +Self +Improvement Individuals [85] +Experts link +Directory +JurisPro Expert witnesses Lawyers [86] + link +ForensisGroup Expert witnesses Lawyers [87] + link +Expert Expert witnesses Lawyers [88] +Institute link + +Appendix: Sources of research and data + + • Top choices: + □ [89]IBIS + □ [90]Profound + □ [91]Research Monitor + □ [92]EuroMonitor + • [93]Inside View + • [94]US Census Data + • [95]SBA’s Office of Entrepreneurship Education Resources + • [96]Pew Research Center + • [97]Statista + • [98]marketresearch.com + • [99]Plunkett Research + • [100]The Market Intelligence Co. + • [101]Jinfo + • [102]IDC + • [103]Gartner + • [104]Pitchbook + • [105]Crunchbase + • [106]Option Impact salary information + • [107]The Venture Capital Executive Compensation Survey + + +References: + +[1] https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/ +[2] https://milan.cvitkovic.net/science/ +[3] https://milan.cvitkovic.net/about/ +[4] https://acesounderglass.com/ +[5] https://acesounderglass.com/hire-me/ +[6] https://acesounderglass.com/tag/epistemicspotcheck/ +[7] https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/#appendix-sources-of-experts +[8] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/evyBmPw9ZnzmoFmP6/experiment-a-good-researcher-is-hard-to-find +[9] http://mindingourway.com/obvious-advice/ +[10] https://www.news10.com/news/national/90-year-old-man-spends-10k-on-ads-to-tell-att-ceo-about-his-slow-internet-service/ +[11] https://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#blinding-yourself +[12] https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/#appendix-sources-of-research +[13] https://blog.alexa.com/sites-for-market-research/ +[14] https://web.jinfo.com/go/blog/73431 +[15] https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub +[16] https://twitter.com/libgen_project +[17] https://www.gwern.net/Blackmail#pseudonymity-bounty +[18] https://www.italki.com/ +[19] https://www.wyzant.com/ +[20] https://www.fiverr.com/ +[21] https://www.upwork.com/ +[22] https://www.sharpestminds.com/ +[23] https://alok.github.io/2022/11/09/dissection/ +[24] https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/making-normal-conversations-better +[25] https://twitter.com/ChanaMessinger/status/1463160594941554696 +[26] https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs +[27] https://www.givewell.org/giving101/Your-dollar-goes-further-overseas +[28] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/personal-best +[29] https://www.npr.org/2020/02/03/802422904/when-things-click-the-power-of-judgment-free-learning +[30] https://www.focusmate.com/ +[31] https://coding-pal.com/ +[32] 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Notes From The Present Future + + • [4]About Om + • Search + +[5] January 21, 2026 + +Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why + +Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible +to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual +publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do +with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the +information ecosystem. + +I started my “information” life typing copy on an ill-tempered Remington. As +a teenage reporter, I saw newspapers being typeset, one letter at a time. It +was a messy, slow, and laborious process. So I don’t carry romantic +notions about the old days. I’ve been quick to embrace any technology that, +in Stephen Covey’s words, helps me keep “the main thing the main thing.” The +main thing is telling a thoroughly reported, well-written story. + +The early 1990s Internet, followed by blogging at the turn of the century, and +social media a decade later all helped me do that main thing. In the mid-2000s +I embraced Dave Winer’s mantra of “sources going direct.” As far back as +2009, I outlined the coming changes in my essays “[6]How Internet Content +Distribution and Discovery Are Changing” and “[7]Amplification and the Changing +Role of Media.” + +For the past decade and a half, the whole information ecosystem has become much +larger, faster and noisier. It is hardly surprising that nothing works. And we +feel a collective sense of overwhelming disappointment.  + +So, why does nothing work? + +Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and +thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first +in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The +new and current organizing principle of information is velocity. + +What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly +it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system +tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and +judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between +truths, half-truths, and lies. + +With so much coming at us all the time, it is difficult to give any single +story or news event much weight. More content means already +fragmented attention fractures even further. + +Greenland, Iran, Venezuela, Epstein Files, Dodgers. On and on. + +Networks have always shaped how societies are organized. Roman roads didn’t +just make travel easier; they mapped the reach of the state and the limits of +power. Shipping routes determined where colonial empires flourished and where +they faded. In the Victorian age, the railways didn’t just shorten journeys; +they rearranged British society. + +They created commuting and leisure, turned market towns into suburbs, +standardized national time, and collapsed the meaning of distance. They also +reordered authority: timetables mattered as much as parliaments. What looks +like cultural choice is often the echo of infrastructure. Today’s mobile, +cloud-linked world is another Victorian moment. Networks compress time and +space, then quietly train us to live at their speed. + +That’s why we get all our information as memes. The meme has become +the metastory, the layer where meaning is carried. You don’t need to read the +thing; you just need the gist, compressed and passed along in +a sentence, an image, or a joke. It has taken the role of the headline. The +machine accelerates this dynamic. It demands constant material; stop feeding it +and the whole structure shakes. The point of the internet now is mostly to hook +attention and push it toward commerce, to keep the engine running. Anyone can +get their cut. + +Velocity has taken over. + +Algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter do not optimize +for truth or depth. They optimize for motion. A piece that moves fast is +considered “good.” A piece that hesitates disappears. There are almost no +second chances online because the stream does not look back. People are not +failing the platforms. People are behaving exactly as the platforms reward. We +might think we are better, but we have the same rat-reward brain. + +We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything +feels rushed and slightly manic. The networks of the past were slower and at a +scale that was adaptable. I wrote about this years ago, and nothing since has +disproved it. So when the author of “beliefs outrun facts” says nothing works, +now you know why. + +The fundamental network-level changes should give you a good idea of why we +have a growing ambivalent relationship toward media as an organized information +entity. I will get into technology media from startup perspective in a +separate piece. For now, I will stick to the broader media ecosystem. + +Let’s use YouTube technology reviews as a case study, because they are +universally understandable. Take the launch of a new phone: when +the embargo lifts, dozens of polished video reviews appear on YouTube. They run +about 20 minutes, share similar thumbnails, and use the same mood lighting. The +reviewers had access to the phones before everyone else, so they had time to +prepare their reviews. + +In the old days, before the current phase of content abundance, folks like Walt +Mossberg, Ed Baig, David Pogue, and Steven Levy were often the first to get +Apple products for review. Sure, these folks had big platforms, but that head +start gave them a lot of clout, which meant many non-Apple +companies offered them early access to their products. I never felt cheated +or misled by their reviews, though I did notice what they omitted after using +the product for a few months. + +These days, things are markedly different. For YouTubers, access is the +currency of survival. Access, of course, means suggested talking points. Again, +nothing new. What’s different is that every reviewer knows that if they paint +outside the lines, they’ll lose access. If you don’t have the review out when +the embargo lifts, it doesn’t matter if you have a better review; no one is +going to notice. + +The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough +to understand it. The “review” at launch outperforms the review written two +months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more +honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by +nature. It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax +on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be +told what to say. The incentives do the talking. + +People do what the network rewards. Writers write for the feed. Photographers +shoot for the scroll. Newsrooms frame stories as conflict because conflict +travels faster than nuance. Even our emotional lives adapt to latency and +refresh cycles. The design of the network becomes the choreography of daily +life. + +In older networks, the constraints were physical. The number of train lines +limited where cities could grow. The number of printing presses limited how +many voices could speak. In our case, the constraint is temporal: how fast +something can be produced, clicked, shared, and replaced. When velocity becomes +the scarcest resource, everything orients around it. This is why it’s wrong to +think of “the algorithm” as some quirky technical layer that can be toggled on +and off or worked around. The algorithm is the culture. It decides what gets +amplified, who gets to make a living, and what counts as “success.” + +Once velocity is the prize, quality becomes risky. Thoughtfulness takes time. +Reporting takes time. Living with a product or an idea takes time. Yet the +window for relevance keeps shrinking, and the penalty for lateness is +erasure. We get a culture optimized for first takes, not best takes. The +network doesn’t ask if something is correct or durable, only if it moves. If it +moves, the system will find a way to monetize it. + +The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true; it cares whether it +moves. Day-one content becomes advertising wearing the mask of criticism. + +All of this folds back into a larger point. When attention is fragmented and +speed becomes the dominant value, media rearranges itself around that +reality. Not because anyone wakes up wanting to mislead people, but because the +context makes some paths survivable and others impossible. + +The YouTube algorithm is the real enforcer because it rewards velocity. Get +into the algorithmic slip stream and you get the numbers and make money. So +it is no surprise that most day-one reviews are, well, anything but. This goes +back to my original premise that when velocity becomes the defining metric, +authority is displaced. + +You don’t need to be right; you need to be first in the feed. Generalize this +beyond YouTube tech reviews and you see the same pattern +everywhere. I’m flabbergasted by how much good journalism goes unnoticed every +day. We didn’t just put journalism, entertainment, politics, and +private lives on networks. We let the networks rewrite what those things are +forand how they work. + +None of what I am saying is new. Decades ago the media sage Marshall McLuhan +summed it up in his timeless phrase, “The medium is the message.” The medium, +the technology or channel of communication, influences society and individuals +more profoundly than the content, altering our senses and habits and, in turn, +our perception, interaction, and culture. The only difference is that network +is like a hydra, and data is the fuel that adds velocity, the new metric of +perceived reality. + +The cost of all this isn’t abstract. It’s the review that took three months but +no one will read. It’s the investigation that required patience. It’s the work +of understanding something before declaring judgment. All of it still exists, +still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. And in a system where only what +travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise. + +In the age of AI, will any of this matter when our idea of information will be +entirely different? + +January 21, 2026. San Francisco + +Photo Courtesy of [8]Yousef Hussain via [9]Unsplash + +[10]My Essays, [11]Technology +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ +[12] 29 comments + +Subscribe to discover Om’s fresh perspectives on the present and future. + +Email address [13][ ] + +SUBSCRIBE + +━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ +[f962dea24b9cd8] + +Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. [26]Read +More [27] + +29 thoughts on this post + + 1. [141e0d] Michaela Barnes says: + [28]January 21, 2026 at 10:30 am + + 15 years old now, but seems relevant + + [29]https://www.amazon.com/Blur-Know-Whats-Information-Overload/dp/ + 1608193012 + + Loading... + [30]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [31]January 21, 2026 at 10:44 am + + Thank you. It seems like we are seeing a progressive degradation. + + Loading... + [32]Reply + 2. [bd4312] Peter says: + [33]January 21, 2026 at 11:56 am + + OM, + Thoughtful and well put. You’ve captured something many of us feel + instinctively but struggle to articulate – that the system now rewards + speed over understanding, and motion over meaning. When velocity becomes + the metric, judgment and depth inevitably get crowded out. A sobering but + important reflection. + Best regards, + Peter + BTW, I really like your photographic style! + + Loading... + [34]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [35]January 21, 2026 at 6:59 pm + + Peter, + + Thank you for the kind words on my photography. It is my sanity valve. + + On the post, thanks for reading. I am glad it caught your attention and + you have felt this. It took me a long time to write this piece, because + I hate writing about media as often as I end up doing. 🙂 I much prefer + to write about the new and the novel. + + Loading... + [36]Reply + 1. [0d16e6] JT says: + [37]January 28, 2026 at 11:51 am + + @Peter, Late-stage newsrooms quietly valued speed over accuracy, + even if they didn’t say it outright. That was 20 years ago. I think + that spread like a virus. + + Loading... + [38]Reply + 3. [5911a3] Harald Striepe says: + [39]January 21, 2026 at 12:20 pm + + Very poignant. + Thank you. + + Loading... + [40]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [41]January 21, 2026 at 6:57 pm + + Thank you Harald. + + Loading... + [42]Reply + 4. [51ebdd] SlicksSlack says: + [43]January 21, 2026 at 12:20 pm + + 2nd and 3rd last paragraphs are very slight rewrites of each other? Am I + missing a point there? Everything else lands with more or less nodding + agreement. + + Loading... + [44]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [45]January 21, 2026 at 6:55 pm + + I should have deleted one of them, but damn, morning without coffee + sucks. And I should not post without waiting and re-reading 🙂 Sorry + about that. + + Loading... + [46]Reply + 5. [23405c] Gideon Rosenblatt says: + [47]January 21, 2026 at 1:47 pm + + Another thought-provoking post, Om. In one of your recent posts, you noted + that for younger segments messages are becoming preferred to the feed. How + do you think that maps to the velocity phenomenon your describing? + + Loading... + [48]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [49]January 21, 2026 at 6:57 pm + + Gideon + + Thanks for the comment. I am hoping to hang out with some young people + soon and would love to update you how they think. My guess is that + “messages” is a way to slowdown things for them. But I would answer + when I am more educated myself. + + Loading... + [50]Reply + 6. [a702e8] [51]Parveen K Chopra says: + [52]January 21, 2026 at 2:48 pm + + Last para repeated, haha + + Loading... + [53]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [54]January 21, 2026 at 6:55 pm + + Oops. Fixed. Thanks for the heads up! + + Loading... + [55]Reply + 7. [c68329] [56]Eric Marcoullier says: + [57]January 21, 2026 at 4:04 pm + + “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” + — Charlie Munger + + All of us early folks (yay, Business 2.0; yay, IGN) really thought we were + creating a new way to expand the availability of news and information. + + What we didn’t realize was that when news becomes a commodity, people stop + paying and ads mean everything. We can no longer prioritize valuable + information and nuanced framing. + + “If it bleeds, it leads” is an old TV adage but man does it feel relevant + today, + + Loading... + [58]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [59]January 21, 2026 at 6:54 pm + + The whole point is that we have undermined the value system around + attention. Everything is marketing. Everyone is selling. So no ones to + say anything that adds friction in the process of selling. 🙂 + + Loading... + [60]Reply + 8. [14ad96] Bob Mason says: + [61]January 21, 2026 at 4:23 pm + + This feels intimately connected to this post from Nic Carter released today + as well. And of course, I received both by way of email newsletters. + + [62]https://murmurationstwo.substack.com/p/ + the-for-you-page-is-killing-social + + Loading... + [63]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [64]January 21, 2026 at 6:54 pm + + Thank you Bob for sharing this. + + Loading... + [65]Reply + 9. [984d4e] Ike Nassi says: + [66]January 21, 2026 at 7:39 pm + + Hmm…. Don’t see a photo. + + Loading... + [67]Reply +10. [f95f4a] MARKO BJELAC says: + [68]January 22, 2026 at 1:09 am + + As often, a very interesting article. + + IMHO the point a bit too much drilled in. Also, a bit defeatist. + + For example, + + This is why it’s wrong to think of “the algorithm” as some quirky + technical layer that can be toggled on and off or worked around. + + I agree with the “worked around” bit but social media algorithms actually + are technical layers. They are just technology and all technology can be + turned off, but their owners do not want that. So, we can use + algorithm-free technology for getting information. I am using that as I + read your newsletter. A long time ago I’ve abandoned Twitter. I still use + Linkedin for networking. Every once in a while I try to scroll Linkedin’s + feed but every time I do that I see low-grade info wasting my time so I + just stop. + + I am a paying subscriber of one Substack. I follow several others for free. + Although these also tend to have bias as again the incentive is to get as + much subscribers as possible. + + I’m also subscribed to several [69]https://theconversation.com/ feeds. + These are giving me unbiased (I currently feel) reports on the state of the + world. + + As Eric commented, the incentive is the reason for this degradation, and it + didn’t start with social media or the internet. If it bleeds it leads. The + core problem is financing the journalists. Journalism is a public service + and should be financed that way. Why can’t it be set up that way? + Peer-reviewed like science (although that one is also being corrupted by + financial incentives). + + So, looks dark but I see ways out. How to get there? + + Loading... + [70]Reply +11. [795954] Menachem Sharron says: + [71]January 22, 2026 at 5:10 am + + Thank you dear Om. + I enjoy reading your emails very much. + Keep going. + Rgds + Menachem Sharron + + Loading... + [72]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [73]January 22, 2026 at 7:18 am + + Thank you Menachem. Wishing you my best + + Loading... + [74]Reply +12. [4d7ec0] Priya Narasimhan says: + [75]January 22, 2026 at 5:41 am + + Great writing, Om! Long time reader, first time commenting… + You’ve articulated what we’re all feeling in daily life. I’ve been thinking + technology is outpacing human adaptability and when it needs intervention, + if at all… + + Loading... + [76]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [77]January 22, 2026 at 7:21 am + + Thank you Priya for reading and commenting. + + We are at a point where human adaptability is going to redefine itself, + and we will perhaps in time learn how to use tools that are only + emerging that will help us figure out how to deal with so much chaos on + the information front. But that would also mean that we might need to + know what we want from our information flows. I am not sure, we are + there yet. + + Loading... + [78]Reply +13. [41caa2] [79]Jamie Diamond says: + [80]January 22, 2026 at 8:38 am + + As a career tech PR guy pitching countless startup stories over the years + to various waves of media over the last (Om my gosh 4 decades) – Om, this + is your most cutting story for me in your vast writing history. It’s not + about me being able to do my job, its not even about the future of AI and + storytelling – I have four little girls that we home school and what kind + of connection will they have and what kind of culture of knowledge will + they grow up in? When the snarky/lie/click-bait meme wins the velocity + narrative race in January of 2026, what’s my now 4 year old going to be + dealing with as she’s read Little Women today and being surrounded by what + authority when she’s 18/28/38? And to totally go off the rails, it’s + today’s velocity authority that pits us all against one another – I’d cite + the book Hate Inc. as to why velocity authority focused on stirring up hate + to drive profit is completely wrong for any culture to be addicted to. Who + is creating the opposite and I’ll do free PR for YOU. + + Loading... + [81]Reply +14. [152fb9] Lee Doolan says: + [82]January 22, 2026 at 4:33 pm + + “… The main thing is telling a thoroughly reported, well-written story….” + + That is exceedingly rare nowadays. + + Loading... + [83]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [84]January 22, 2026 at 6:28 pm + + They are rare to find, but not rare as an entity + + Loading... + [85]Reply +15. [178c8c] [86]Andrew McLuhan says: + [87]January 23, 2026 at 12:18 pm + + “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or + pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” (1964) + + Always nice to see someone get it. + + Loading... + [88]Reply + 1. [f962de] Om Malik says: + [89]January 23, 2026 at 4:13 pm + + I think it helps to have been old and have read things as they were + meant to be read — in full long form. Thanks for stopping by! + + Loading... + [90]Reply +16. [02174e] [91]Arix Fïen says: + [92]January 24, 2026 at 12:21 am + + This really resonates with me. I keep feeling that tension between wanting + to slow down and understand something properly, and knowing the system + barely rewards that anymore. When velocity becomes the signal of value, + depth almost feels like a liability. It’s sobering to see how + infrastructure quietly rewrites what authority, trust, and even “good work” + look like. + + Loading... + [93]Reply + +Leave a Reply [94]Cancel reply + +Your email address will not be published. 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https://om.co/author/om/ +[28] https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/#comment-180398 +[29] https://www.amazon.com/Blur-Know-Whats-Information-Overload/dp/1608193012 +[30] https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/?replytocom=180398#respond +[31] https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/#comment-180401 +[32] https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/?replytocom=180401#respond +[33] https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/#comment-180402 +[34] https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/?replytocom=180402#respond +[35] https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/#comment-180426 +[36] https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/?replytocom=180426#respond +[37] https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/#comment-180774 +[38] 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Codex Ten + +SubscribeSign in + +The Dilbert Afterlife + +Sixty-eight years of highly defective people + +Jan 16, 2026 +1,932 +874 +292 +Share + +Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate +cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive +[11]1. + +Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part +of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before +graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ +stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt +some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between +Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re +all inmates in prisons with different names. + +But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were +about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in +the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a +crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid +consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. +There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the +engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. +They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re +back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd +outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around +here. + +Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. +Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles +while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, +is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type +of wound his art is trying to numb. + +This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse +proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, +so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s +paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. +The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping +the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a +passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all. + +The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too +scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, +but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk +and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell +you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s +perfectly-white teeth. + +Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated +contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert +strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be +Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He +Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To +This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He +Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick +Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get +Interesting. + +If your reaction is “I would absolutely buy that book”, then keep reading, but +expect some detours. + +Fugitive From The Cubicle Police + +The niche that became Dilbert opened when Garfield first said “I hate Mondays”. +The quote became a popular sensation, inspiring [13]t-shirts, coffee mugs, and +even [14]a hit single. But (as I’m hardly the first to point out) why should +Garfield hate Mondays? He’s a cat! He doesn’t have to work! + +In the 80s and 90s, saying that you hated your job was considered the height of +humor. Drew Carey: “Oh, you hate your job? There’s a support group for that. +It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.” + +This was merely the career subregion of the supercontinent of Boomer +self-deprecating jokes, whose other prominences included “I overeat”, “My +marriage is on the rocks”, “I have an alcohol problem”, and “My mental health +is poor”. + +[15] +[https] + +Arguably this had something to do with [18]the Bohemian turn, the reaction +against the forced cheer of the 1950s middle-class establishment of company men +who gave their all to faceless corporations and then dropped dead of heart +attacks at 60. You could be that guy, proudly boasting to your date about how +you traded your second-to-last patent artery to complete a spreadsheet that +raised shareholder value 14%. Or you could be the guy who says “Oh yeah, I have +a day job working for the Man, but fuck the rat race, my true passion is white +water rafting”. When your father came home every day looking haggard and worn +out but still praising his boss because “you’ve got to respect the company or +they won’t take care of you”, being able to say “I hate Mondays” must have felt +liberating, like the mantra of a free man[19]2. + +[20] +[https] + +This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle +wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something. If you were really +clever, you’d put the Dilbert comic where Dilbert gets in trouble for putting a +comic on his cubicle wall on your cubicle wall, and dare them to move against +you. + +(again, I was ten at the time. I only know about this because Scott Adams would +start each of his book collections with an essay, and sometimes he would talk +about letters he got from fans, and many of them would have stories like +these.) + +But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as +hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to +tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then +going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job - +become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to +love it. The worm turns, all that is cringe becomes based once more and vice +versa. Imagine that guy boasting to his date again. One says: “Oh yeah, I +grudgingly clock in every day to give my eight hours to the rat race, but trust +me, I’m secretly hating myself the whole time”? The other: “I work for a +boutique solar energy startup that’s ending climate change - saving the +environment is my passion!” Zoomers are worse still: not even the fig leaf of +social good, just pure hustle. + +Silicon Valley, where hustle culture has reached its apogee, has an additional +consideration: why don’t you found a startup? If you’re so much smarter than +your boss, why not compete against him directly? Scott Adams based Dilbert on +his career at Pacific Bell in the 80s. Can you imagine quitting Pacific Bell in +the 80s to, uh, found your own Pacific Bell? To go to Michael Milken or whoever +was investing back then, and say “Excuse me, may I have $10 billion to create +my own version of Pacific Bell, only better?” But if someone were to try to be +Dilbert today – to say, earnestly, “I hate my job because I am smarter than my +boss and could do it better than him,” that would be the obvious next question, +the same way “I am better at picking stocks than Wall Street” ought to be +followed up with “Then why don’t you invest?” + +[21] +[https] + +Above, I described “the nerd experience” of “being smarter than everyone else, +not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane +man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to +overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing +anything useful.” You nodded along, because you knew the only possible +conclusion to the arc suggested by that sentence was to tear it down, to launch +a tirade about how that nerd is naive and narcissistic and probably somehow +also a racist. In the year of our Lord 2026, of course that’s where I’m going. + +Dilbert is a relic of a simpler time, when the trope could be played straight. +But it’s also an artifact of the transition, maybe even a driver of it. Scott +Adams appreciated these considerations earlier and more acutely than anyone +else. And they drove him nuts. + +Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain + +Adams knew, deep in his bones, that he was cleverer than other people. God +always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. His usual strategy is +straightforward enough: let them reach the advanced physics classes, where +there will always be someone smarter than them, then beat them on the head with +their own intellectual inferiority so many times that they cry uncle and admit +they’re nothing special. + +For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He +created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a +world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly +comics about hating work. + +Scott Adams never forgave this. Too self-aware to deny it, too narcissistic to +accept it, he spent his life searching for a loophole. You can read his +frustration in his book titles: How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win +Big. Trapped In A Dilbert World. Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. Still, +he refused to stick to comics. For a moment in the late-90s, with books like +The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future, he seemed on his way to be +becoming a semi-serious business intellectual. He never quite made it, maybe +because the Dilbert Principle wasn’t really what managers and consultants +wanted to hear: + + I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the + least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re + the ones you don't want doing actual work. You want them ordering the + doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments—you know, + the easy work. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers—your smart + people—aren't in management. + +Okay, “I am cleverer than everyone else”, got it. His next venture (c. 1999) +was the Dilberito, an attempt to revolutionize food via a Dilbert-themed +burrito with the full Recommended Daily Allowance of twenty-three vitamins. I +swear I am not making this up. A contemporaneous NYT review [23]said it “could +have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch +without much thought to taste”. The Onion, in its twenty year retrospective for +the doomed comestible, [24]called it a frustrated groping towards meal +replacements like Soylent or Huel, long before the existence of a culture nerdy +enough to support them. Adams himself, looking back from several years’ +distance, was even more scathing: “the mineral fortification was hard to +disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the +Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.” + +His second foray into the culinary world was a local restaurant called +Stacey’s. The New York Times does a pitch-perfect job covering the results. +[25]Their article starts: + + This is yet another story about a clueless but obtrusive boss — the kind of + meddlesome manager you might laugh at in the panels of “Dilbert,” the daily + comic strip. + +…and continues through a description of Adams making every possible rookie +mistake. As the restaurant does worse and worse, Adams becomes more and more +convinced that he has to figure out some clever lifehack that will turn things +around and revolutionize restaurants. First he comes up with a theory that +light is the key to restauranting, and spends ages fiddling with the windows. +When this fails, he devolves into an unmistakable sign of desperation - asking +blog commenters for advice: + + He also turned to Dilbert fans for suggestions on how to use the party + room, in a posting on his blog titled “Oh Great Blog Brain.” The Dilbert + faithful responded with more than 1,300 comments, mixing interesting ideas + (interactive murder-mystery theater) with unlikely mischief (nude + volleyball tournaments). Mr. Adams asked his employees to read the comments + and is now slowly trying some of them. + +But what makes this article truly perfect - I can’t believe it didn’t get a +Pulitzer - is that it’s not some kind of hostile ambush profile. Adams is +totally self-aware. He also finds the whole situation hilarious! Everyone +involved is in on the joke! The waiters find it hilarious! After every workday, +Adams and the waiters get together and laugh long into the night together about +how bad a boss Adams is! + +[26] +Scott Adams, Creator of the Satirical 'Dilbert' Comic Strip, Dies at 68 - The +New York Times + +There’s a running joke about how if you see a business that loses millions +yearly, it’s probably run by some banker’s wife who’s getting subsidized to +feel good about herself and pretend she has a high-powered job. I think this is +approximately what was going on with Stacey’s. Adams made enough money off +Dilbert that he could indulge his fantasies of being something more than “the +Dilbert guy”. For a moment, he could think of himself as a +temporarily-embarrassed businessman, rather than just a fantastically +successful humorist. The same probably explains his forays into television +(“Dilbert: The Animated Series”), non-Dilbert comics (“Plop: The Hairless +Elbonian”), and technology (”WhenHub”, his site offering “live chats with +subject-matter experts”, which was shelved after he awkwardly tried to build +publicity by suggesting that mass shooting witnesses could profit by using his +site to tell their stories.) + +Adams and Elon Musk occasionally talked about each other - usually to defend +one another against media criticism of their respective racist rants - but I +don’t know if they ever met. I wonder what it would have been like if they did. +I imagine them coming together at some Bay Area house party on copious amounts +of LSD or MDMA. One, the world’s greatest comic writer, who more than anything +else wanted to succeed in business. The other, the world’s greatest +businessman, who more than anything else wanted people to think that he’s +funny. Scott Adams couldn’t stop frittering his talent and fortune on doomed +attempts to be taken seriously. But someday Elon Musk will buy America for $100 +trillion, tell the UN that he’s renaming it “the United States of 420-69”, and +the assembled ambassadors will be as silent as the grave. Are there psychic +gains from trade to be had between two such people? + +Michael Jordan was the world’s best basketball player, and insisted on testing +himself against baseball, where he failed. [29]Herbert Hoover was one of the +world’s best businessmen, and insisted on testing himself against politics, +where he crashed and burned. We’re all inmates in prisons of different names. +Most of us accept it and get on with our lives. Adams couldn’t stop rattling +the bars. + +I’m No Scientist, But I Think Feng Shui Is Part Of The Answer + +Having failed his forays into business, Adams turned to religion. Not in the +sense of seeking consolation through God’s love. In the sense of trying to show +how clever he was by figuring out the true nature of the Divine + +The result was [31]God’s Debris. This is not a good book. On some level, Adams +(of course) seemed to realize this, but (of course) his self-awareness only +made things worse. In the second-worst introduction to a work of spiritual +wisdom I’ve ever read ([32]Gurdjieff keeps first place by a hair), he explains +that this is JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT and IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL. +But also, it really makes you think, and it’s going to blow your mind, and +you’ll spend the rest of your life secretly wondering whether it was true, but +it won’t be, because IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, and IF YOU TAKE IT +SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL. Later, in [33]a Bloomberg interview, he would say that +this book - and not Dilbert - would be his “ultimate legacy” to the world. But +remember, IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, and IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY YOU +FAIL. + +I read it for the first time while researching this essay. The frame story is +that a delivery boy gives a package to the wisest man in the universe, who +invites him to stay a while and discuss philosophy (REMEMBER, IT’S JUST A WORK +OF FICTION! THESE ARE ONLY CHARACTERS!) Their discussion is one-quarter classic +philosophical problems that seemed deep when you were nineteen, presented with +no reference to any previous work: + + “There has to be a God,” I said. “Otherwise, none of us would be here.” It + wasn’t much of a reason, but I figured he didn’t need more. + + “Do you believe God is omnipotent and that people have free will?” he + asked. + + “That’s standard stuff for God. So, yeah.” + + “If God is omnipotent, wouldn’t he know the future?” + + “Sure.” + + “If God knows what the future holds, then all our choices are already made, + aren’t they? Free will must be an illusion.” + + He was clever, but I wasn’t going to fall for that trap. “God lets us + determine the future ourselves, using our free will,” I explained. + + “Then you believe God doesn’t know the future?” + + “I guess not,” I admitted. “But he must prefer not knowing.” + +There is an ongoing meta-discussion among philosophy discussers of how +acceptable it is to propose your own answers to the great questions without +having fully mastered previous scholarship. On the one hand, philosophy is one +of the most fundamental human activities, gating it behind the near-impossible +task of having read every previous philosopher is elitist and gives +self-appointed guardians of scholarship a permanent heckler’s veto on any new +ideas, and it can create a culture so obsessed with citing every possible +influence that eventually the part where you have an opinion withers away and +philosophy becomes a meaningless ritual of presenting citations without +conclusion. On the other hand, this book. + +Another quarter is philosophical questions which did not seem deep, even when +you were nineteen, and which nobody has ever done work on, because nobody +except Scott Adams ever even thought they were worth considering: + + What makes a holy land holy?” he asked. + + “Well, usually it’s because some important religious event took place + there.” + + “What does it mean to say that something took place in a particular + location when we know that the earth is constantly in motion, rotating on + its axis and orbiting the sun? And we’re in a moving galaxy that is part of + an expanding universe. Even if you had a spaceship and could fly anywhere, + you can never return to the location of a past event. There would be no + equivalent of the past location because location depends on your distance + from other objects, and all objects in the universe would have moved + considerably by then.” + + “I see your point, but on Earth the holy places keep their relationship to + other things on Earth, and those things don’t move much,” I said. + + “Let’s say you dug up all the dirt and rocks and vegetation of a holy place + and moved it someplace else, leaving nothing but a hole that is one mile + deep in the original location. Would the holy land now be the new location + where you put the dirt and rocks and vegetation, or the old location with + the hole?” + + “I think both would be considered holy,” I said, hedging my bets. + + “Suppose you took only the very top layer of soil and vegetation from the + holy place, the newer stuff that blew in or grew after the religious event + occurred thousands of years ago. Would the place you dumped the topsoil and + vegetation be holy?” + + “That’s a little trickier,” I said. “I’ll say the new location isn’t holy + because the topsoil that you moved there isn’t itself holy, it was only in + contact with holy land. If holy land could turn anything that touched it + into more holy land, then the whole planet would be holy.” + + The old man smiled. “The concept of location is a useful delusion when + applied to real estate ownership, or when giving someone directions to the + store. But when it is viewed through the eyes of an omnipotent God, the + concept of location is absurd. While we speak, nations are arming + themselves to fight for control of lands they consider holy. They are + trapped in the delusion that locations are real things, not just fictions + of the mind. Many will die.” + +Another quarter of the discussion is the most pusillanimous possible +subjectivism, as if [34]Robert Anton Wilson and the 2004 film What the #$*! Do +We Know!? had a kid, then strangled it at birth until it came out brain +damaged. We get passages like these: + + “I am saying that UFOs, reincarnation, and God are all equal in terms of + their reality.” + + “Do you mean equally real or equally imaginary?” + + “Your question reveals your bias for a binary world where everything is + either real or imaginary. That distinction lies in your perceptions, not in + the universe. Your inability to see other possibilities and your lack of + vocabulary are your brain’s limits, not the universe’s.” + + “There has to be a difference between real and imagined things,” I + countered. “My truck is real. The Easter Bunny is imagined. Those are + different.” + + “As you sit here, your truck exists for you only in your memory, a place in + your mind. The Easter Bunny lives in the same place. They are equal.” + +I remember the late ‘90s and early ‘00s; I was (regrettably) there. For some +reason, all this stuff was considered the height of wisdom back then. The +actual Buddhist classics were hard to access, but everyone assumed that +Buddhists were wise and they probably said, you know, something like this. If +you said stuff like this, you could be wise too. + +[35] +[https] + +The final quarter of the book is a shockingly original take on the Lurianic +kabbalah. I‘m not pleased to report this, and Adams likely would have been very +surprised to learn it. Still, the resemblance is unmistakable. The wisest man +in the world, charged with answering all of the philosophical problems that +bothered you when you were nineteen, tells the following story: if God exists, +He must be perfect. Therefore, the only thing he lacks is nonexistence. +Therefore, in order to fill that lack, He must destroy himself in order to +create the universe. The universe is composed of the fragments of that +destruction - the titular God’s Debris. Its point is to reassemble itself into +God. Partially-reassembled-God is not yet fully conscious, but there is some +sort of instinct within His fragments - ie within the universe - that is +motivated to help orchestrate the self-reassembly, and it is this instinct +which causes anti-entropic processes like evolution. Good things are good +because they aid in the reassembly of God; bad things are bad because they +hinder it. + +[36] +[https] + +Adams’ version adds several innovations to this basic story. Whatever parts of +God aren’t involved in physical matter have become the laws of probability; +this explains the otherwise inexplicable evolutionary coincidences that created +humankind. There’s something about how gravity is produced by some sort of +interference between different divine corpuscules - Adams admits that Einstein +probably also had useful things to say about gravity, but probably his own +version amounts to the same thing, and it’s easier to understand, and that +makes it better (IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT! IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU +FAIL.) But my favorite part is the augmentation of Luria with Nick Land: the +final (or one of the final) steps in the divine reassembly is the creation of +the Internet, aka “God’s nervous system”, which will connect everything to +everything else and give the whole system awareness of its divine purpose. + +I’m honestly impressed that a Gentile worked all of this out on his own. Adams +completes the performance by [37]reinventing Kegan levels (this time I’m +agnostic as to whether it’s convergent evolution or simple plagiarism), +although characteristically it is in the most annoying way possible: + + [The wise man] described what he called the five levels of awareness and + said that all humans experience the first level of awareness at birth. That + is when you first become aware that you exist. + + In the second level of awareness you understand that other people exist. + You believe most of what you are told by authority figures. You accept the + belief system in which you are raised. + + At the third level of awareness you recognize that humans are often wrong + about the things they believe. You feel that you might be wrong about some + of your own beliefs but you don’t know which ones. Despite your doubts, you + still find comfort in your beliefs. + + The fourth level is skepticism. You believe the scientific method is the + best measure of what is true and you believe you have a good working grasp + of truth, thanks to science, your logic, and your senses. You are arrogant + when it comes to dealing with people in levels two and three. + + The fifth level of awareness is the Avatar. The Avatar understands that the + mind is an illusion generator, not a window to reality. The Avatar + recognizes science as a belief system, albeit a useful one. An Avatar is + aware of God’s power as expressed in probability and the inevitable + recombination of God consciousness. + +I think going through every David Chapman essay and replacing the word +“metarationality” with “THE AVATAR” would actually be very refreshing. + +What are we to make of all of this? + +Nothing is more American than inventing weird cringe fusions of religion and +atheism where you say that God doesn’t exist as (gestures upward) some Big Man +In The Sky the way those people believe, but also, there totally is a God, in +some complicated sense which only I understand. When Thomas Jefferson cut all +the passages with miracles out of his Bible, he was already standing on the +shoulders of generations of Unitarians, Quakers, and Latitudinarians. + +This was augmented by the vagaries of nerd culture’s intersection with the +sci-fi fandom. The same people who wanted to read about spaceships and ray guns +also wanted to read about psionics and Atlantis, so the smart sci-fi nerd +consensus morphed into something like “probably all that unexplained stuff is +real, but has a scientific explanation”. Telepathy is made up of quantum +particles, or whatever (I talk about this more in [38]my article on the Shaver +Mystery). It became a nerd rite of passage to come up with your own theory that +reconciled the spiritual and the material in the most creative way possible. + +And the Nineties (God’s Debris was published in 2001) were a special time. The +decade began with the peak of Wicca and neopaganism. Contra current ideological +fault lines, where these tendencies bring up images of Etsy witches, they +previously dominated nerd circles, including male nerds, techie nerds, and +right-wing nerds (did you know [39]Eric S. Raymond is neopagan?) By decade’s +end, the cleverest (ie most annoying) nerds were switching to New Atheism; +throughout, smaller groups were exploring Discordianism, chaos magick, and the +Subgenius. The common thread was that Christianity had lost its hegemonic +status, part of being a clever nerd was patting yourself on the back for having +seen through it, but exactly what would replace it was still uncertain, and +there was still enough piety in the water supply that people were uncomfortable +forgetting about religion entirely. You either had to make a very conscious, +marked choice to stop believing (New Atheism), or try your hand at the task of +inventing some kind of softer middle ground (neopaganism, Eastern religion, +various cults, whatever this book was supposed to be). + +It’s Obvious You Won’t Survive By Your Wits Alone + +Adams spent his life obsessed with self-help. Even more than a businessman or a +prophet, he wanted to be a self-help guru. Of course he did. His particular +package of woo - a combination of hypnosis, persuasion hacks, and social skills +advice - unified the two great motifs of his life. + +Thesis: I am cleverer than everyone else. + +Antithesis: I always lose to the Pointy-Haired Boss. + +Synthesis: I was trying to be rational. But most people are irrational sheep; +they can be directed only by charismatic manipulators who play on their biases, +not by rational persuasion. But now I’m back to being cleverer than everyone +else, because I noticed this. Also, I should become a charismatic manipulator. + +I phrased this in a maximally hostile way, but it’s not wrong. And Adams +started off strong. He read Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence +People, widely agreed to be the classic book on social skills. + +[41] +[https] + +Then, in search of even stronger persuasion techniques, he turned to hypnosis. +This has a bad reputation, but I basically buy that something is there. +Psychiatry has [42]legends of psychotherapist-hypnotists who achieved amazing +things, and there’s [43]a plausible scientific story for why it might work. So +when Adams claimed to be a master hypnotist, I was originally willing to give +him the benefit of the doubt. + +That lasted until I read [44]The Religion War[45]3, Adams’ sequel to God’s +Debris. In the intro, which may be literally the most annoying passage ever +written in all two million years of human history, he discusses the reception +of the original book: + + This is a sequel to my book God’s Debris, a story about a deliveryman who + chances upon the smartest person in the world and learns the secrets of + reality. I subtitled that book A Thought Experiment and used a variety of + hypnosis techniques in an attempt to produce a feeling of euphoric + enlightenment in the reader similar to what the main character would feel + while discovering the (fictionally) true nature of reality. Reactions to + the book were all over the map. About half of the people who e-mailed me + said they felt various flavors of euphoria, expanded awareness, + connectedness, and other weird sensations that defied description. A + surprising number of people reported reading the entire book twice in one + day. So I know something was happening. + + Other people wrote angry letters and scathing reviews, pointing out the + logical and factual flaws in the book. It is full of flaws, and much of the + science is made up, as it states in the introduction. I explained that the + reader is supposed to be looking for flaws. That’s what makes the + experiment work. You might think this group of readers skipped the + introduction and missed the stated point of the book, but I suspect that + something else is going on. People get a kind of cognitive dissonance + (brain cramp) when their worldview is disturbed. It’s fun to watch. + +I previously felt bad for writing this essay after Adams’ death; it seems kind +of unsporting to disagree with someone who can’t respond. These paragraphs +cured me of my misgivings: after his death is by far the best time to disagree +with Scott Adams. + +The book is a novel (a real novel this time, with plot and everything) meant to +dramatize the lessons of its predecessor. In the near future, the Muslims and +Christians are on the verge of global war. Adams’ self-insert character, the +Avatar, goes around hypnotizing and mind hacking everyone into cooperating with +his hare-brained scheme for world peace. + +[46] +[https] + +In an early chapter, the Christian alliance has captured the Avatar and sent +him to be tortured. But the Avatar masterfully deflects the torturer’s +attention with a bit of cold reading, some pointed questions, and a few +hypnotic suggestions: + + As the Avatar planned, the interrogator’s conscious mind was scrambled by + the emotions and thoughts of the past minutes. This brutish man, accustomed + to avoiding deep thoughts, had imagined the tiniest particles of the + universe, his childhood, and the battles of the future. He had laughed, + felt pain and pity, been intellectually stimulated, confused, assured, and + uncertain. The Avatar had challenged his worldview, and it was evaporating, + leaving him feeling empty, unimportant, and purposeless + +In the thrilling climax, which takes place at Stacey’s Cafe (yes, it’s the +real-world restaurant Adams was managing - yes, he turned his +religious-apocalyptic thriller novel into an ad for his restaurant - yes, I bet +he thought of this as a “hypnotic suggestion”), the characters find the Prime +Influencer. She is able to come up with a short snappy slogan so memetically +powerful that it defeats fundamentalist religion and ends the war (the slogan +is: “If God is so smart, why do you fart?”). Adams’ mouthpiece character says: + + It wasn’t the wisdom of the question that made it so powerful; philosophers + had posed better questions for aeons. It was the packaging—the marketing, + if you will—the repeatability and simplicity, the timing, the Zeitgeist, + and in the end, the fact that everyone eventually heard it from someone + whose opinion they trusted.The question was short, provocative, and cast in + the language of international commerce that almost everyone + understood—English. Most important, and generally overlooked by historians: + It rhymed and it was funny. Once you heard it, you could never forget it. + It looped in the brain, gaining the weight and feel of truth with each + repetition. Human brains have a limited capacity for logic and evidence. + Throughout time, repetition and frequency were how people decided what was + most true. + +This paragraph is the absolute center of Adams’ worldview (later expanded to +book length several times in tomes named things like Win Bigly: Persuasion In A +World Where Facts Don’t Matter). People don’t respond to logic and evidence, so +the world is ruled by people who are good at making catchy slogans. +Sufficiently advanced sloganeering is indistinguishable from hypnosis, and so +when Adams has some cute turns of phrase in his previous book, he describes it +as “[I] used a variety of hypnosis techniques in an attempt to produce a +feeling of euphoric enlightenment in the reader”. This is the cringiest way +possible to describe cute turns of phrase, and turns me off from believing any +his further claims to hypnotic mastery. + +Throughout this piece, I’ve tried to emphasize that Adams was usually pretty +self-aware. Did that include the hypnosis stuff? I’m not sure. I think he would +have answered: certainly some people are great charismatic manipulators. Either +their skills are magic, or they operate by some physical law. If they operate +by physical law, they should be learnable. Maybe I’m not quite Steve Jobs level +yet, but I have to be somewhere along the path to becoming Steve Jobs, right? +And why not describe it in impressive terms? Steve Jobs would have come up with +impressive-sounding terms for any skills he had, and you would have believed +him! + +Every few months, some group of bright nerds in San Francisco has the same +idea: we’ll use our intelligence to hack ourselves to become hot and +hard-working and charismatic and persuasive, then reap the benefits of all +those things! This is such a seductive idea, there’s no reason whatsoever that +it shouldn’t work, and every yoga studio and therapist’s office in the Bay Area +has a little shed in the back where they keep the skulls of the last ten +thousand bright nerds who tried this. I can’t explain why it so invariably goes +wrong. The best I can do is tell a story where, when you’re trying to do this, +you’re selecting for either techniques that can change you, or techniques that +can compellingly make you think you’ve been changed. The latter are much more +common than the former. And the most successful parasites are always those +which can alter their host environment to be more amenable to themselves, and +if you’re a parasite taking the form of a bad idea, that means hijacking your +host’s rationality. So you’re really selecting for things that are compelling, +seductive, and damage your ability to tell good ideas from bad ones. This is a +just-so story that I have no evidence for - but seriously, go to someone who +has the words “human potential” on their business card and ask them if you can +see the skull shed. + +[47] +Dilbert Power Pose - Fretboard Anatomy + +But also: it’s attractive to be an effortlessly confident alpha male who oozes +masculinity. And it’s . . . fine . . . to be a normal person with normal-person +hangups. What you really don’t want to be is a normal person who is +unconvincingly pretending to be a confident alpha male. “Oh hello, nice to meet +you, I came here in my Ferrari, it’s definitely not a rental, you’re having the +pasta - I’m choosing it for you because I’m so dominant - anyway, do you want +to have sex when we get back? Oh, wait, I forgot to neg you, nice hair, is it +fake?” + +[48] +Amy Cuddy power poses through pop culture | TED Blog + +In theory, becoming a hot charismatic person with great social skills ought to +be the same kind of task as everything else, where you practice a little and +you’re bad, but then you practice more and you become good. But the uncanny +valley is deep and wide, and Scott Adams was too invested in saying “Ha! I just +hypnotized you - ha! There, did it again!” for me to trust his mountaineering +skills. + +Don’t Step In The Leadership + +It all led, inexorably, to Trump. + +In summer 2015, Trump came down his escalator and announced his presidential +candidacy. Given his comic status, his beyond-the-pale views, and his +competition with a crowded field including Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, traditional +media wrote him off. Sure, he immediately led in the polls, but political +history was full of weirdos who got brief poll bumps eighteen months before an +election only to burn out later. The prediction markets listed his chance of +the nomination (not the Presidency!) at 5%. + +Which made it especially jarring when, in August, Scott Adams wrote a blog post +asserting that Trump had “a 98% chance” of winning. This claim received +national attention, because Trump was dominating the news cycle and Adams was +approximately the only person, anywhere, who thought he had a chance. + +There are two ways to make historically good predictions. The first way is to +be some kind of brilliant superforecaster. Adams wasn’t this. Every big +prediction he made after this one failed. Wikipedia notes that he dominated a +Politico feature called “[50]The Absolute Worst Political Prediction of 20XX”, +with the authors even remarking that he “has managed to appear on this annual +roundup of the worst predictions in politics more than any other person on the +planet”. His most famous howler was that if Biden won in 2020, Republicans +“would be hunted” and his Republican readers would “most likely be dead within +a year”. But other highlights include “a major presidential candidate will die +of COVID”, “the Supreme Court will overturn the 2024 election”, and “Hillary +Clinton will start a race war”. + +The other way to make a great prediction is to live your entire life for one +perfect moment - the inveterate bear who predicted twelve of the last zero +recessions, but now it’s 2008 and you look like a genius. By 2015, Adams had +become a broken record around one point: people are irrational sheep who are +prey for charismatic manipulators. The pointy-haired boss always wins. Trump +was the pointiest-haired person in the vicinity, and he was obviously trying to +charismatically play on people’s instincts while other people were doing +comparatively normal politics. Scott Adams’ hour had arrived. + +[51] + +But Adams also handled his time in the spotlight masterfully. He gave us terms +like “clown genius”. I hate using this, because I know Scott Adams was sitting +at his desk in his custom-built Dilbert-head-shaped tower thinking “What sort +of hypnotic catchy slogans can I use to make my meme about Trump spread . . . +aha! Clown genius! That has exactly the right ring!” and it absolutely worked, +and now everyone who was following the Internet in 2015 has the phrase “clown +genius” etched into their brains (Adams calls these “linguistic kill shots”; +since I remember that term and use it often, I suppose “linguistic kill shot” +is an example of itself). He went from news outlet to news outlet saying “As a +trained hypnotist, I can tell you what tricks Trump is using to bamboozle his +followers, given that rational persuasion is fake and marketing techniques +alone turn the wheels of history,” and the news outlets ate it up. + +[52] +Image +You probably thought I was making up the part where Scott Adams has a +custom-built tower shaped like Dilbert’s head. + +And some of his commentary was good. He was one of the first people to point +out the classic Trump overreach, where he would say something like “Sleepy Joe +Biden let in twenty trillion illegal immigrants!” The liberal media would take +the bait and say “FACT CHECK: False! - Joe Biden only let in five million +illegal immigrants!”, and thousands of people who had never previously been +exposed to any narrative-threatening information would think “Wait, Joe Biden +let in five million illegal immigrants?!” Once you notice it, it’s hard to +unsee. + +Adams started out by stressing that he was politically independent. He didn’t +support Trump, he was just the outside hypnosis expert pointing out what Trump +was doing. IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL. +Indeed, “this person is a charismatic manipulator hacking the minds of +irrational sheep” is hardly a pro-Trump take. And he lived in Pleasanton, +California - a member in good standing of the San Francisco metropolitan area - +and nice Pleasantonians simply did not become Trump supporters in 2016. + +On the other hand, at some point, his increasingly overblown theories of +Trump’s greatness opened up a little wedge. The growing MAGA movement started +treating him as one of their own; liberals started to see him as an enemy. His +fame turned the All-Seeing Eye of social media upon him, that gaze which no man +may meet without consequence. Once you’re sufficiently prominent, politics +becomes a separating equilibrium; if you lean even slightly to one side, the +other will pile on you [55]so massively and traumatically that it will force +you into their opponents’ open arms just for a shred of psychological security. + +As he had done so many other times during his life, he resolved the conflict in +the dumbest, cringiest, and most public way possible: a June 2016 blog post +announcing that he was endorsing Hillary Clinton, for his own safety, because +he suspected he would be targeted for assassination if he didn’t: + + This past week we saw Clinton pair the idea of President Trump with nuclear + disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and whatever else makes you + tremble in fear. That is good persuasion if you can pull it off because + fear is a strong motivator. It is also a sharp pivot from Clinton’s prior + approach of talking about her mastery of policy details, her experience, + and her gender. Trump took her so-called “woman card” and turned it into a + liability. So Clinton wisely pivoted. Her new scare tactics are solid-gold + persuasion. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see Clinton’s numbers versus + Trump improve in June, at least temporarily, until Trump finds a + counter-move. + + The only downside I can see to the new approach is that it is likely to + trigger a race war in the United States. And I would be a top-ten + assassination target in that scenario […] + + So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal + safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic + Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton + supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my + safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the + safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. + + As I have often said, I have no psychic powers and I don’t know which + candidate would be the best president. But I do know which outcome is most + likely to get me killed by my fellow citizens. So for safety reason, I’m on + team Clinton. + + My prediction remains that Trump will win in a landslide based on his + superior persuasion skills. But don’t blame me for anything President Trump + does in office because I endorse Clinton. + +This somehow failed to be a masterstroke of hypnotic manipulation that left +both sides placated. But it was fine, because Trump won anyway! In the New +Right’s wave of exultation, all was forgiven, and the first high-profile figure +to bet on Trump became a local hero and confirmed prophet. Never mind that +Adams had predicted Trump would win by “one of the biggest margins we’ve seen +in recent history” when in fact he lost the popular vote. The man who had +dreamed all his life of being respected for something other than cartooning had +finally made it. + +Obviously, it destroyed him. + +At first, I wondered if Adams’ right-wing turn was a calculated manuever. He’d +always longed to be a manipulator of lesser humans, and had finally achieved +slightly-above-zero skill at it. Wouldn’t it fit his personality to see the +right-wingers as dumb sheep, and himself as the clever Dogbert-style scammer +who could profit off them? Did he really believe (as he claimed) that he was at +risk of being assassinated by left-wing radicals who couldn’t handle his level +of insight into Trump’s genius? Or was this just another hypnotic suggestion, +retrospectively justified insofar as we’re still talking about it ten years +later and all publicity is good publicity? + +[56] +[https] + +But I don’t think he did it cynically. At the turn of the millennium, the +obsessed-with-their-own-cleverness demographic leaned firmly liberal: smug New +Atheists, hardline skeptics, members of the “reality-based community”. But in +the 2010s, liberalism became the default, the public switched to expertolatry, +dumb people’s orthodoxies about race and gender became easier and more fun to +puncture than dumb people’s orthodoxies about religion - and the O.W.T.O.C.s +lurched right. Adams was borne along by the tide. With enough time, dedication, +and archive access, you can hop from Dilbert comic to Dilbert comic, tracing +the exact contours of his political journey. + +[57] +[https] +([60]source) +[61] +[https] +([64]source) + +There’s a passage in the intro to one of Adams books where he says that, given +how he’s going to blow your mind and totally puncture everything you previously +believed, perhaps the work is unsuitable for people above fifty-five, whose +brains are comparatively sclerotic and might shatter at the strain. This is how +I feel about post-2016 politics. Young people were mostly able to weather the +damage. As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public +intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of +partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul +Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it +would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of +insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn +that was blowing? + +Adams was 58 when Trump changed everything. In 2001, age 44, he’d found the +failure of his Dilberito funny. But in another interview, at age 50, he +suggested that maybe his competitors had formed teams to sneak into +supermarkets and hide them in the back of the shelves. Being tragically flawed +yet also self-aware enough to laugh about it is a young man’s game. + +In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via +ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian +Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking +right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer. Scott Adams, the +man too clever and independent to join any political tendency, who had sworn to +always be the master manipulator standing above the fray rather than a sheep +with ordinary object-level opinions - had finally succumbed to sincere belief. + +It’s Not Funny If I Have To Explain It + +Every child is hypomanic, convinced of their own specialness. Even most +teenagers still suspect that, if everything went right, they could change the +world. + +It’s not just nerds. Everyone has to crash into reality. The guitar player who +starts a garage band in order to become a rockstar. The varsity athlete who +wants to make the big leagues. They all eventually realize, no, I’m mediocre. +Even the ones who aren’t mediocre, the ones with some special talent, only have +one special talent (let’s say cartooning) and no more. + +I don’t know how the musicians and athletes cope. I hear stories about +washed-up alcoholic former high school quarterbacks forever telling their +girlfriends about how if Coach had only put them in for the last quarter during +the big game, things would have gone differently. But since most writers are +nerds, it’s the nerds who dominate the discussion, so much so that the whole +affair gets dubbed “Former Gifted Kid Syndrome”. + +Every nerd who was the smartest kid in their high school goes to an +appropriately-ranked college and realizes they’re nothing special. But also, +once they go into some specific field they find that intellect, as versatile as +it is, can only take them so far. And for someone who was told their whole +childhood that they were going to cure cancer (alas, a real quote from my +elementary school teacher), it’s a tough pill to swallow. + +[66]Reaction formation, where you replace a unbearable feeling with its exact +opposite, is one of the all time great Freudian defense mechanisms. You may +remember it from such classics as “rape victims fall in love with their rapist” +or “secretly gay people become really homophobic”. So some percent of washed-up +gifted kids compensate by really, really hating nerdiness, rationality, and the +intellect. + +The variety of self-hating nerd are too many to number. There are the nerds who +go into psychology to prove that EQ is a real thing and IQ merely its pale +pathetic shadow. There are the nerds who become super-woke and talk about how +reason and objectivity are forms of white supremacy culture. There are the +nerds who obsess over “embodiment” and “somatic therapy” and accuse everyone +else of “living in their heads”. There are the nerds who deflect by becoming +really into neurodiversity - “the interesting thing about my brain isn’t that +I’m ‘smart’ or ‘rational’, it’s that I’m ADHDtistic, which is actually a +weakness . . . but also secretly a strength!” There are the nerds who flirt +with fascism because it idolizes men of action, and the nerds who convert to +Christianity because it idolizes men of faith. There are the nerds who get +really into Seeing Like A State, and how being into rationality and metrics and +numbers is soooooo High Modernist, but as a Kegan Level Five Avatar they are +far beyond such petty concerns. There are the nerds who redefine “nerd” as +“person who likes Marvel movies” - having successfully gerrymandered themselves +outside the category, they can go back to their impeccably-accurate +statisticsblogging on educational outcomes, or their deep dives into +anthropology and medieval mysticism, all while casting about them imprecations +that of course nerds are loathsome scum who deserve to be bullied. + +(maybe it’s unfair to attribute this to self-hatred per se. Adams wrote, not +unfairly, that the scientismists in Kegan level 4 “are arrogant when it comes +to dealing with people in levels two and three.” Maybe there’s the same +desperate urge for level 5 to differentiate themselves from 4s - cf. [67] +barberpole theory of fashion). + +Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As +compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was +humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its +handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was +his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other +nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve +gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion / +hypnosis.” + +When he was young, and his mind supple, he was able to balance both these +mechanisms; the steam of their dissonance drove the turbine of his art. As he +grew older, the first one - especially the self-awareness - started to fail, +and he leaned increasingly heavily on the second. Forced to bear the entire +weight of his wounded psyche, it started showing more and more cracks, until +eventually he ended up as a podcaster - the surest sign of a deranged mind. + +In comparison, his final downfall was almost trivial - a bog-standard +cancellation, indistinguishable from every other cancellation of the 2015 - +2025 period. Angered by a poll where some black people expressed discomfort +with the slogan “It’s Okay To Be White”, Adams declared that “the best advice I +would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get +the fuck away”. Needless to say, his publisher, syndicator, and basically every +newspaper in the country dropped him immediately. He relaunched his comics on +Locals, an online subscription platform for cancelled people, but his reach had +declined by two orders of magnitude and never recovered. + +[68] +[https] + +Adams was willing to sacrifice everything for the right to say “It’s Okay To Be +White”. I can’t help wondering what his life would have been like if he’d been +equally willing to assert the okayness of the rest of his identity. + +Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life + +In case it’s not obvious, I loved Scott Adams. + +Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating +myself. You’re a bald guy with glasses named Scott A who lives in the San +Francisco Bay Area. You think you’re pretty clever, but the world has a way of +reminding you of your limitations. You try to work a normal job. You do a +little funny writing on the side. People like the funny writing more than you +expected. Hardly believing your luck, you quit to do the funny writing full +time. You explore themes about the irrationality of the world. You have some +crazy ideas you’re not entirely willing to stand behind, and present them as +fiction or speculation or April Fools jokes. You always wonder whether your +purpose in life is really just funny writing - not because people don’t love +the stuff you write, not even because you don’t get fan mail saying you somehow +mysteriously changed people’s lives, but just because it seems less serious +than being a titan of industry or something. You try some other things. They +don’t go terribly, but they don’t go great either. You decide to stick with +what you’re good at. You write a book about the Lurianic kabbalah. You get +really into whale puns. + +[70] +Shave the Whales (Dilbert #4) by Scott Adams | Goodreads + +As we pass through life, sometimes God shows us dopplegangers, bright or dark +mirrors of ourselves, glimpses of how we might turn out if we zig or zag on the +path ahead. Some of these people are meant as shining inspirations, others as +terrible warnings, but they’re all our teachers. + +Adams was my teacher in a more literal way too. He published several annotated +collections, books where he would present comics along with an explanation of +exactly what he was doing in each place, why some things were funny and others +weren’t, and how you could one day be as funny as him. Ten year old Scott +devoured these. I’ve always tried to hide my power level as a humorist, lest I +get pegged as a comedic author and people stop taking me seriously. But +objectively my joke posts get the most likes and retweets of anything I write, +and I owe much of my skill in the genre to cramming Adams’ advice into a +malleable immature brain[73]4. There’s a direct line between Dogbert’s crazy +schemes and the startup ideas in a typical Bay Area House Party post. + +[74] +[https] + +The Talmud tells the story of the death of Rabbi Elisha. Elisha was an evil +apostate. His former student, Rabbi Meir, who stayed good and orthodox, +insisted that Rabbi Elisha probably went to Heaven. This was never very +plausible, and God sent increasingly obvious signs to the contrary, including a +booming voice from Heaven saying that Elisha was not saved. Out of loyalty to +his ex-teacher, Meir dismissed them all - that voice was probably just some +kind of 4D chess move - and insisted that Elisha had a share in the World To +Come. + +Out of the same doomed loyalty as Rabbi Meir, I want to believe Scott Adams +went to Heaven. + +There is what at first appears to be promising evidence - in [77]his final +message to his fans, Adams said: + + Many Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I’m not a + believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so + looks attractive. So here I go: I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and + savior, and I like forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about + me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. + I won’t need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified + for entry. + +It is a dogma of many religions that sincere deathbed conversions are accepted. +But I’d be more comfortable if this sounded less like “haha, I found my final +clever lifehack”. I can only hope he didn’t try to implant any hypnotic +suggestions in an attempt to get a linguistic kill shot in on the Almighty. As +another self-hating nerd writer put it, “through all these years I make +experiment if my sins or Your mercy greater be.” + +But I’m more encouraged by the second half of his departing note: + + For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy + husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages + don't always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable + way. I'm grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my + family. + + Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I + donated myself to "the world," literally speaking the words out loud in my + otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add + the most to people's lives, one way or another. + + That marked the start of my evolution from Dilbert cartoonist to an author + of - what I hoped would be - useful books. By then, I believed I had + condensed enough life lessons that I could start passing them on. I + continued making Dilbert comics, of course. + + As luck would have it, I'm a good writer. My first book in the "useful" + genre was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. That book + turned out to be a huge success, often imitated, and influencing a wide + variety of people. I still hear every day how much that book changed lives. + My plan to be useful was working. + + I followed up with my book Win Bigly, that trained an army of citizens how + to be more persuasive, which they correctly saw as a minor super power. I + know that book changed lives because I hear it often. + + You'll probably never know the impact the book had on the world, but I + know, and it pleases me while giving me a sense of meaning that is + impossible to describe. + + My next book, Loserthink, tried to teach people how to think better, + especially if they were displaying their thinking on social media. That one + didn't put much of a dent in the universe, but I tried. + + Finally, my book Reframe Your Brain taught readers how to program their own + thoughts to make their personal and professional lives better. I was + surprised and delighted at how much positive impact that book is having. + + I also started podcasting a live show called Coffee With Scott Adams, + dedicated to helping people think about the world, and their lives, in a + more productive way. I didn't plan it this way, but it ended up helping + lots of lonely people find a community that made them feel less lonely. + Again, that had great meaning for me. + + I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits + from my work, I'm asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the + legacy I want. + + Be useful. + + And please know I loved you all to the end. + +I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the +event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show. I couldn’t +entirely follow, but I think his various sub-shows are getting rolled into a +broader brand, The Scott Adams School, where his acolytes discuss and teach his +theory of persuasion: + +[78] +[https] + +The woman on the top left is his ex-wife. Even though they’ve been divorced for +twelve years, they never abandoned each other. All the other faces are people +who found Adams revelatory and are choosing to continue his intellectual +tradition. And in the comments - thirteen thousand of them - are other people +who loved Adams. Some watch every episode of his podcast and consider him a +genius. Others were touched in more subtle ways. People who wrote him with +their problems and he responded. People who met him on the street and demanded +the typical famous person “pose for a photo with me”, and he did so graciously. +People who said his self-help books really helped them. People who just used +Dilbert to stay sane through their cubicle jobs. + +(also one person blaming his death on the COVID vaccine, but this is Twitter, +you’re never going to avoid that) + +Adams is easy and fun to mock - as is everyone who lives their life uniquely +and unapologetically. I’ve had a good time psychoanalyzing him, but everyone +does whatever they do for psychological reasons, and some people end up doing +good. + +[81] +[https] + +Though I can’t endorse either Adams’ politics or his persuasive methods, [82] +everything is a combination of itself and an attempt to build a community. And +whatever the value of his ideas, the community seems real and loving. + +And I’m serious when I say I consider Adams a teacher. For me, he was the sort +of teacher who shows you what to avoid; for many others, he was the type who +serves as inspiration. These roles aren’t quite opposites - they’re both +downstream of a man who blazed his own path, and who recorded every step he +took, with unusual grace and humor, as documentation for those who would face a +choice of whether or not to follow. This wasn’t a coincidence, but the +conscious and worthy project of his life. Just for today, I’ll consider myself +part of the same student body as all the other Adams fans, and join my fellows +in tribute to our fallen instructor. + +I hope he gets his linguistic kill shot in on God and squeaks through the +Pearly Gates. + +[83] +[https] +Source: [86]cartoonsbyardeet.com + +[87]1 + +As is quantum complexity blogger Scott Aaronson. + +[88]2 + +Cf. the old joke about the Soviet Jew trying to emigrate to Israel. The secret +police is giving him a hard time - “What don’t you like about our communist +paradise? You think the economy is too weak?” “Oh no, I can’t complain.” “You +think the politics are oppressive?” “Oh no, I can’t complain.” “You think we +prevent you from practicing your primitive religion?” “Oh no, I can’t +complain.” “Then why do you want to leave for Israel?” “Because there, I can +complain.” + +[89]3 + +"What’s the normal English term for when holy people fight over holy sites +because of their differing beliefs about what is holy? Oh, right, a Religion +War.” + +[90]4 + +To be more precise, half of my skill. I attribute the other half to Dave Barry, +who I consumed the same way during the same period of my life. + +1,932 +874 +292 +Share +PreviousNext + +874 Comments + +User's avatar +[ ] +[ ] +[ ] +[ ] +TopLatestDiscussions + +No posts + +Ready for more? + +[112][ ] +Subscribe +© 2026 Scott Alexander · [114]Privacy ∙ [115]Terms ∙ [116]Collection notice +[117] Start your Substack[118]Get the app +[119]Substack is the home for great culture + +This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please [120]turn on JavaScript +or unblock scripts + +References: + +[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/ +[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/ +[11] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife#footnote-1-184503512 +[13] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=i+hate+mondays&crid=3EPL7ZRK6BGPV&sprefix=i+hate+mondays%2Caps%2C162 +[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Hate_Mondays_(song) +[15] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Fl_W!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F10240efc-3717-4ffa-9f25-79748e59593e_1308x832.png +[18] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-first-sixth-of-bobos +[19] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife#footnote-2-184503512 +[20] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h97p!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4490cf87-6b8e-4f3a-ae0e-9da418f9885f_781x239.png +[21] 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https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wQWz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F720da5f3-2c0e-43b6-b934-68cfd0e70408_1200x368.jpeg +[52] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!V5QG!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd736f2b0-eb7d-472f-84ef-c9665d204db9_1512x2016.jpeg +[55] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma +[56] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IpkI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0002d718-fe7e-495a-8838-af19360dada1_785x253.png +[57] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xtI9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ed683b4-8687-468f-93e4-0e4ed4a10a92_795x299.png +[60] https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2020-06-02 +[61] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vExF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F45f1cd27-0d24-41ec-af88-21c7b9937d0b_793x303.png +[64] https://scottadams.locals.com/post/4617146/dilbert-reborn-9-22-23 +[66] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_formation +[67] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ +[68] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KXGn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3bc5ae27-2f25-4b70-bd92-bcba7e6bce03_785x253.png +[70] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!G4bN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbe506216-3992-44f0-bd00-72ff3a5d8a55_318x338.jpeg +[73] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife#footnote-4-184503512 +[74] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xehp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa0d1d224-bcde-4b12-bb58-a7ba9586a4a9_838x349.png +[77] https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/2011116140626657458 +[78] https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/2011091094113828959 +[81] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oryF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9073f798-f4b2-483b-9bd2-a4010fa09128_1024x321.jpeg +[82] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/ +[83] https://cartoonsbyardeet.com/ +[86] https://cartoonsbyardeet.com/ +[87] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife#footnote-anchor-1-184503512 +[88] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife#footnote-anchor-2-184503512 +[89] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife#footnote-anchor-3-184503512 +[90] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife#footnote-anchor-4-184503512 +[114] https://substack.com/privacy +[115] https://substack.com/tos +[116] https://substack.com/ccpa#personal-data-collected +[117] https://substack.com/signup?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=footer +[118] https://substack.com/app/app-store-redirect?utm_campaign=app-marketing&utm_content=web-footer-button +[119] https://substack.com/ +[120] https://enable-javascript.com/ diff --git a/static/archive/www-manton-org-htmmhe.txt b/static/archive/www-manton-org-htmmhe.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..97c9abf --- /dev/null +++ b/static/archive/www-manton-org-htmmhe.txt @@ -0,0 +1,71 @@ +● [1]Manton Reece +[2]About [3]Photos [4]Videos [5]Archive [6]30 days [7]90 parks [8]Replies [9] +Reading [10]Search [11]Also on Micro.blog + +Velocity and authenticity + +[12]Jan 21, 2026 + +When I read a blog post I love, I usually find my favorite part of it to quote +in a short post on my own blog. Sometimes I can’t find a single excerpt that +fits, so I turn it into a full blog post and add more commentary. Such is the +case with [13]this fantastic essay by Om Malik: + + What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how + quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. + In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards + motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you + can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies. + +Om doesn’t focus on ad-based platforms, but I think the incentives are similar. +Meta is fine with rushing us through an algorithmic feed because there is no +end. The more engaged we are, the more ads we see. + + We built systems that reward acceleration, then act surprised when + everything feels rushed, shallow, and slightly manic. People do what the + network rewards. Writers write for the feed. Photographers shoot for the + scroll. Newsrooms frame stories as conflict because conflict travels faster + than nuance. + +We should slow down in 2026. Take more time to read longer posts. Full stories, +not headlines. This is why when I cancelled all of my news subscriptions, I +kept only The New Yorker. Longer, thoughtful posts that I read once a week +instead of all the time. + +AI will bring us infinite content, with a velocity that humans can’t match. It +will be noise, overwhelming. Then we will become numb to it. The only antidote +is authenticity. Knowing that what you’re reading is coming from a real human +with their own perspective, their own strengths and flaws, because you’ve +followed them for years. + +[14]Also on Bluesky [15] [3] +Manton Reece [16]@manton + + • [17]RSS + • [18]JSON Feed + • [19]Surprise me! + • [20]Tweets + + +References: + +[1] https://www.manton.org/ +[2] https://www.manton.org/about/ +[3] https://www.manton.org/photos/ +[4] https://www.manton.org/videos/ +[5] https://www.manton.org/archive/ +[6] https://www.manton.org/30-days/ +[7] https://www.manton.org/90-parks/ +[8] https://www.manton.org/replies/ +[9] https://www.manton.org/reading/ +[10] https://www.manton.org/search/ +[11] https://micro.blog/manton +[12] https://www.manton.org/2026/01/21/velocity-and-authenticity.html +[13] https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/ +[14] at://did:plc:pko7wbcggok753hnvndxh3ni/app.bsky.feed.post/3mcxsfazjmv2m +[15] https://www.manton.org/ +[16] https://micro.blog/manton +[17] https://www.manton.org/feed.xml +[18] https://www.manton.org/feed.json +[19] https://www.manton.org/surprise-me/ +[20] https://www.manton.org/tweets/ diff --git a/static/archive/www-manton-org-to8xs2.txt b/static/archive/www-manton-org-to8xs2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5637264 --- /dev/null +++ b/static/archive/www-manton-org-to8xs2.txt @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +● [1]Manton Reece +[2]About [3]Photos [4]Videos [5]Archive [6]30 days [7]90 parks [8]Replies [9] +Reading [10]Search [11]Also on Micro.blog + +[12]Jan 20, 2026 + +[13]Matt Mullenweg blogged about Scott Adams, trying to reconcile good memories +of Dilbert with later racist comments: + + When I was younger, I used to have a more binary view of people, but as + I’ve grown, read a ton of biographies, seen the press cycles, and been + lucky enough to meet some idols and villains, I’ve become much more + comfortable taking everyone as a flawed human being. + +Nuance here is difficult because we shouldn’t downplay hurtful comments with a +“both sides”-style argument. Sometimes we must draw a line. Still, I agree we +should avoid reducing people to a single moment. + +[14]Also on Bluesky [15] [3] +Manton Reece [16]@manton + + • [17]RSS + • [18]JSON Feed + • [19]Surprise me! + • [20]Tweets + + +References: + +[1] https://www.manton.org/ +[2] https://www.manton.org/about/ +[3] https://www.manton.org/photos/ +[4] https://www.manton.org/videos/ +[5] https://www.manton.org/archive/ +[6] https://www.manton.org/30-days/ +[7] https://www.manton.org/90-parks/ +[8] https://www.manton.org/replies/ +[9] https://www.manton.org/reading/ +[10] https://www.manton.org/search/ +[11] https://micro.blog/manton +[12] https://www.manton.org/2026/01/20/matt-mullenweg-blogged-about-scott.html +[13] https://ma.tt/2026/01/a-better-writer/ +[14] at://did:plc:pko7wbcggok753hnvndxh3ni/app.bsky.feed.post/3mcui3dej6n2n +[15] https://www.manton.org/ +[16] https://micro.blog/manton +[17] https://www.manton.org/feed.xml +[18] https://www.manton.org/feed.json +[19] https://www.manton.org/surprise-me/ +[20] https://www.manton.org/tweets/