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--- ---
title: "Dispatch #18 (August 2024)" title: "Dispatch #18 (August 2024)"
date: 2024-08-07T15:35:45-04:00 date: 2024-08-13T00:37:47-04:00
draft: false draft: false
tags: tags:
- dispatch - dispatch
references: references:
- title: "The Limits Of The Billionaire Imagination Are Everyone's Problem | Defector"
url: https://defector.com/the-limits-of-the-billionaire-imagination-are-everyones-problem
date: 2024-08-13T03:35:16Z
file: defector-com-8wrecr.txt
- title: "The Rot Economy - Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At"
url: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/
date: 2024-08-13T03:37:13Z
file: www-wheresyoured-at-7mfome.txt
- title: "AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?"
url: https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/
date: 2024-08-13T03:39:45Z
file: www-citationneeded-news-4myqvd.txt
- title: "Recently - macwright.com" - title: "Recently - macwright.com"
url: https://macwright.com/2024/08/01/recently url: https://macwright.com/2024/08/01/recently
date: 2024-08-09T03:43:36Z date: 2024-08-09T03:43:36Z
@@ -13,54 +25,100 @@ references:
url: https://macwright.com/2024/07/07/world-beyond-your-head url: https://macwright.com/2024/07/07/world-beyond-your-head
date: 2024-08-09T03:43:55Z date: 2024-08-09T03:43:55Z
file: macwright-com-59hl5f.txt file: macwright-com-59hl5f.txt
- title: "Time travelling for parents · Hauken"
url: https://hauken.io/time-travelling/
date: 2024-08-12T17:19:44Z
file: hauken-io-v7sjyb.txt
- title: "The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz - The Verge"
url: https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24204706/marc-andreessen-ben-horowitz-a16z-trump-donations
date: 2024-08-13T04:21:48Z
file: www-theverge-com-qbbp8t.t
- title: "Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites"
url: https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/
date: 2024-08-13T04:23:30Z
file: danilafe-com-0cob7b.txt
- title: "A Diminishing Portfolio of Enthusiasms | John P. Weiss - Blog"
url: https://johnpweiss.com/blog/196014/a-diminishing-portfolio-of-enthusiasms
date: 2024-08-13T04:25:22Z
file: johnpweiss-com-ta0xym.txt
--- ---
Some thoughts here... Our boy's two months old today! Look at this little dude.
<!--more--> <!--more-->
* "Who has write access to your worldview?" {{<dither IMG_2821.jpeg "782x600" />}}
* Roof replacement (selecting a vendor) {{<dither IMG_2965.jpeg "782x600" />}}
* Balance: family, work, health, creativity
* (adulting, sleep) We did a newborn photo shoot with [G. Lin Photography][1], though no one told Nevie she wasn't the star.
* Photo shoot
* Racefest
* Durham Library
* Amateur woodworking
{{<dither BabyNico-48.jpg "782x600" />}} {{<dither BabyNico-48.jpg "782x600" />}}
{{<dither BabyNico-118.jpg "782x600" />}} {{<dither BabyNico-118.jpg "782x600" />}}
[1]: https://www.glinphotography.com/
We took the kids to a few Bulls games. Snacks consumed: many. Baseball consumed: none.
{{<dither IMG_3323.jpeg "782x600" />}} {{<dither IMG_3323.jpeg "782x600" />}}
{{<dither IMG_6441.jpeg "782x600" />}} {{<dither IMG_6441.jpeg "782x600" />}}
{{<dither IMG_6463.jpeg "782x600" />}} I finished Nev's art table as well as a few other small projects. I doubt I'll ever be a great (or even good) woodworker, but I derive considerable satisfaction from building simple pieces and quickly modifying things around the house.
{{<dither IMG_6464.jpeg "782x600" />}} {{<dither IMG_6464.jpeg "782x600" />}}
{{<dither IMG_6463.jpeg "782x600" />}}
I signed up for [Bull City Race Fest][2] half-marathon for what'll be the third year in a row. It is so hot out right now that afternoon long runs aren't really tenable, but night runs work well with my screwed up sleep schedule (though that's how I [turned my ankle something fierce][3] last year). Knowing I need to be able to run 13 miles in a few short months is doing wonders for my discipline.
[2]: https://capstoneraces.com/bull-city-race-fest/
[3]: /journal/dispatch-8-october-2023/
Randomly:
* I needed to replace the roof on my house, and for the first time in my life, I needed to collect bids and select a vendor. I'm used to being in the opposite role as a consultant trying to win work, and so it was weird being the one getting pitched instead of pitching, and in a domain I know next-to-nothing about. It definitely gave me more empathy for what our clients go through in selecting a technical partner. I ended up with a company that was price competitive and just gave me a good gut feeling, and I'm happy with the result.
* I've been thinking about the authors whose worldviews really speak to me, like [David Roth][4], [Ed Zitron][5], and [Molly White][6]. I was initially drawn to these folks because they were able to eloquently express thoughts and feelings I was already having about topics like blockchain, AI, and capitalism more broadly. But over time, I've consumed more and more of this content in an increasingly unquestioning way. I find my views getting increasingly extreme, and I've sort of lost the ability to relate to people who feel more positively about these things.
[4]: https://defector.com/the-limits-of-the-billionaire-imagination-are-everyones-problem
[5]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/
[6]: https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/
This month: This month:
* Adventure: Rehoboth Beach with my family. We've done this trip for the last four years, and every year the number of children in attendance has increased by one, a trend that simply cannot continue. * Adventure: Rehoboth Beach with my family. We've done this trip for the last four years, and every year the number of children in attendance has increased by one, a trend that simply cannot continue.
* Project: [This is one of my favorite albums][1], and here's how they describe the creation process: "write and record a collection of drum-free samples, then flip them into an albums' worth of beats." I'd like to produce a track in this style this month. * Project: [This is one of my favorite albums][7], and here's how they describe the creation process: "write and record a collection of drum-free samples, then flip them into an albums' worth of beats." I'd like to produce a track in this style this month.
* Skill: Drum programming * Skill: Finger drumming / drum programming in general
[1]: https://birocratic.bandcamp.com/album/ninety-nine [7]: https://birocratic.bandcamp.com/album/ninety-nine
Reading: Reading:
* Fiction: [_Moonbound_][2], Robin Sloan -- quite a departure from _Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore_ but I'm digging it so far; I like an absurd story told in a straightforward way * Fiction: [_Moonbound_][8], Robin Sloan -- quite a departure from _Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore_ but I'm digging it so far; I like an absurd story told in a straightforward way
* Non-fiction: [_The World Beyond Your Head_][3], Matthew B. Crawford -- I've read another book by this author, _Shop Class as Soulcraft_, and Tom MacWright spoke highly of this one in his [recent update][4] and [review][5] * Non-fiction: [_The World Beyond Your Head_][9], Matthew B. Crawford -- I've read another book by this author, _Shop Class as Soulcraft_, and Tom MacWright spoke highly of this one in his [recent update][10] and [review][11]
[2]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/wizard-s-design-robin-sloan/20374751 [8]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/wizard-s-design-robin-sloan/20374751
[3]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-world-beyond-your-head-on-becoming-an-individual-in-an-age-of-distraction-matthew-b-crawford/8484056?ean=9780374535919 [9]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-world-beyond-your-head-on-becoming-an-individual-in-an-age-of-distraction-matthew-b-crawford/8484056?ean=9780374535919
[4]: https://macwright.com/2024/08/01/recently [10]: https://macwright.com/2024/08/01/recently
[5]: https://macwright.com/2024/07/07/world-beyond-your-head [11]: https://macwright.com/2024/07/07/world-beyond-your-head
Links: Links:
* [Title][6] * [Time travelling for parents][12]
* [Title][7]
* [Title][8]
[6]: https://example.com/ > One day, you’ll pick up your child for the last time. You’ll change the last diaper, give the last piggyback ride, read the last bedtime story. But this is the crucial point: You will never know it’s the last time when it happens. It’ll slip by, unnoticed.
[7]: https://example.com/
[8]: https://example.com/ * [The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz][13]
> Two of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capitalists make the case for backing Trump: that their ability to make money is the only value that matters.
* [Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites][14]
> In this time, I’ve been on the lookout for ways to improve the site, and I’ve seen quite a few little things that are nice to use, but relatively easy to implement. They don’t really make or break a website; the absence of such features might be noticed, but will not cause any disruption for the reader. On the other hand, their presence serves as a QoL enhancement.
* [A Diminishing Portfolio of Enthusiasms][15]
> In other words, don’t melt into your couch and stop living. Don’t give up on life just because your portfolio of enthusiasms has diminished. There are always ways to squeeze more out of life, even if you’re old and less able to do the things you used to.
[12]: https://hauken.io/time-travelling/
[13]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24204706/marc-andreessen-ben-horowitz-a16z-trump-donations
[14]: https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/
[15]: https://johnpweiss.com/blog/196014/a-diminishing-portfolio-of-enthusiasms

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Daniel's Blog
[1]Home [2]About [3]GitHub [4]Resume [5]Tags [6]Series [7]Favorites [8]Search
[9]All Posts
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites
[10]Website
Posted on June 23, 2024.
Table of Contents
• [11]Sidenotes
• [12]Tables of Contents
□ [13]Bonus: Showing Page Progress
• [14]Easily Linkable Headings
• [15]Grouping Series of Posts
• [16]Dialogues
• [17]Code Blocks with Origin
□ [18]Bonus: Code Blocks with Clickable Links
• [19]Markers for External Links
□ [20]Bonus: Different Markers for Different Destinations
□ [21]Bonus: Link Preview
• [22]RSS Feeds
• [23]Links to Other Sites
• [24]Conclusion + Anything Else?
Some time ago, Hillel Wayne published an article titled [25]Microfeatures I’d
like to see in more languages . In this article, he described three kinds of
features in programming languages: fundamental features, deeply engrained
features, and nice-to-have convenience features. Hillel’s premise was that
language designers tend to focus on the first two; however, because the
convenience features are relatively low-overhead, it’s easier for them to jump
between projects, and they provide a quality-of-life increase.
I’ve been running a blog for a while — some of the oldest posts I’ve found
(which are no longer reflected on this site due to their low quality) were from
2015. In this time, I’ve been on the lookout for ways to improve the site, and
I’ve seen quite a few little things that are nice to use, but relatively easy
to implement. They don’t really make or break a website; the absence of such
features might be noticed, but will not cause any disruption for the reader. On
the other hand, their presence serves as a QoL enhancement. I find these to be
analogous to Hillel’s notion of “microfeatures”. If you’re interested in adding
something to your site, consider browsing this menu to see if anything
resonates!
One last thing is that this post is not necessarily about microfeatures I’d
like every blog or personal website to have. Some ideas I present here are only
well-suited to certain types of content and certain written voices. They need
not be applied indiscriminately.
With that, let’s get started!
[26]
Sidenotes
[27]Gwern is, in my view, the king of sidenotes. Gwern’s writing makes very
heavy use of them (at least based on the articles that I’ve read). This is
where I originally got inspiration for [28]my own implementation in Hugo. Check
out the page on [29]hydrocephalus for an example; Here’s what a piece of that
page looks like on my end at the time of writing:
A screenshot of Gwern's page on hydrocephalus. The main article text is
accompanied by notes in both the left and right margin.
A screenshot of Gwern’s page on hydrocephalus
Sidenotes are nice because they allow for diversions without interrupting the
main article’s flow. You can provide additional details for the curious reader,
or — [30]as Gwern does — use the sidenotes for citing studies or sources. In
either case, the reading experience is significantly more pleasant that
footnotes, for which you typically have to go to the bottom of the page, and
then return to the top.
Another reason I called Gwern the “king of sidenotes” is [31]this page on
sidenotes . There, Gwern documents numerous approaches to this feature, mostly
inspired by [32]Tufte CSS . The page is very thorough — it even includes a link
to my own work, as unknown as it may be! I would recommend checking it out if
you are interested in enhancing your site with sidenotes.
[33]
Tables of Contents
Not all personal sites include tables of contents (TOCs), but they are nice.
They serve two purposes:
1. Seeing at a glance what the post will be about, in the form of headings.
2. Being able to navigate to an interesting part of the page without having to
scroll.
Static site generators (I myself use [34]Hugo ) are typically able to generate
TOCs automatically, since they are already generating the HTML and know what
headings they are inserting into the page. For instance, Hugo has [35]
TableOfContents . I suspect the same is true for other existing website
technologies.
Despite this, I actually had to look relatively long to find sites I frequent
that have TOCs to show off as examples here. The first one I came across —
after Gwern’s, whose site will be mentioned plenty in this post anyway — is
[36]Faster than Lime . Take this post on [37]Rust’s Futures ; this is what the
top of it looks like at the time of writing:
A screenshot of the table of contents on Faster than Lime. A box with the word
"Contents" contains links to several sections on the page bellow (off screen)
A screenshot of the table of contents on Faster than Lime
The quality and value of TOCs certainly depends on the sections within the page
itself — and whether or not the page has sections at all! — but in my opinion,
the benefits to navigation become apparent even for relatively simple pages.
As an honorable mention, I’d like to show [38]Lars Hupel’s site . The pages on
the site don’t — as far as I can tell — have internal tables of contents.
However, pages that are part of a series — such as the [39]introduction to
CRDTs — have tables of contents that span the entire series.
A screenshot of the table of contents on Lars Hupel's site. A box with the
words "Series Navigation" contains links to several other pages in the series.
A screenshot of the table of contents on Lars Hupel’s site
I also find this very nice, though it does miss out on headings within a page.
[40]
Bonus: Showing Page Progress
I’ve mentioned that tables of contents can communicate the structure of the
page. However, they do so from the outset, before you’ve started reading. In
their “base form”, the reader stops benefiting from tables of contents once
they’ve started reading. [41][ ][note: That is, of course, unless they jump
back to the top of the post and find the table of contents again. ]
If you want to show progress while the reader is somewhere in the middle of a
page, you could use a page progress bar. I’ve noticed one while reading [42]
Quanta Magazine ; it looks like this (recording my scrolling through the [43]
most recent article at the time of writing ).
The progress bar on a Quanta Magazine article. As the page scrolls, an orange
bar at the top gradually fills up from left to right.
The progress bar on a Quanta Magazine article
One immediate thought is that this is completely superseded by the regular
browser scroll bar that’s ever-present at the side of the page. However, the
scroll bar could be deceiving. If your page has a comments section, the
comments could make the page look dauntingly long. Similarly, references to
other pages and general “footer material” count towards the scroll bar, but
would not count towards the progress bar.
Combining the two, you could imagine an always-visible table of contents that
highlights the current section you’re in. With such a feature, you can always
see where you are (including a rough estimate of how far into the page you’ve
scrolled), and at the same time see how the current section integrates into the
broader structure. I’ve seen this done before, but could not find a site off
the top of my head that implements the feature; as a fallback, here’s the [44]
CSS tricks tutorial that shows how to implement a dynamic table of contents,
and a recording of me scrolling through it:
The table of contents from a CSS Tricks demo. As the page scrolls, the current
section in the table of contents becomes bold.
The table of contents from a CSS Tricks demo
[45]
Easily Linkable Headings
How can you link a particular section of a page to your friend? There’s a
well-defined mechanism to do this in HTML: you can use the ID of a particular
HTML element, and add it as #some-id to the end of a link to the page. The link
then takes the user to that particular HTML element. I can do this, for
instance, to link to the [46]sidenotes section above .
How does one discover the ID of the part of the page that they want to link to?
The ID is not a “visual” property; it’s not displayed to the user, and is
rather a detail of HTML itself. Thus, on any given page, even if every element
has a unique, linkable ID, I can’t make use of it without going into Inspect
Element and trying to find the ID in the HTML tree.
The simple solution is to make the elements that you want to be easily
“linkable” into links to themselves! Then, the user can right-click the element
in question (probably the heading) and click Copy Link. Much easier! To
demonstrate a similar idea, [47]here is a link to this paragraph itself. You
can now use the context menu to Copy Link, put it in your browser, and voilà —
you’re right back here!
As with [48]tables of contents , many website technologies provide most of the
tooling to add support for this feature. Relatively often I come across pages
that have unique IDs for each header, but no clickable links! I end up having
to use inspect element to find the anchor points.
A variation on this idea — if you don’t want to make the entire heading or
title a link — is to include alongside it (before or after) a clickable element
that is a link to that title. You can click that element to retrieve link
information, instead (and the icon additionally tells you that this is
possible). Hugo’s documentation does this: here’s a screenshot of [49]an
arbitrary page .
A title and paragraph from the Hugo documentation. Next to the title there is a
blue link symbol.
A title and paragraph from the Hugo documentation
[50]
Grouping Series of Posts
Some authors like to write at length on a particular topic; to get the content
out to readers faster (and to make the resulting pages less daunting), it makes
sense to break a single topic up into a series. The easiest way to do this is
to just… publish several articles, possibly with related names, and link them
to each other. Done!
With a little more effort, though, the series-reading and series-writing
experience could be nicer. Instead of manually inserting links, you could
configure your website to automatically add a “next” and “previous” button to
pages in a given series. You could also give an overview of a particular series
and create a “navigation hub” for it.
As an example, the [51]Chapel language blog has navigation buttons. Here’s a
screenshot from [52]a post in the Advent of Code series :
Series navigation buttons on a Chapel blog post. There are two buttons; one
links to a previous page in the series, another links to the next.
Series navigation buttons on a Chapel blog post
I’ve mentioned this in the section on [53]tables of contents , but [54]Lars
Hupel’s site has tables of contents that link between series. I’m not sure if
it’s automatically generated or hand-written, but it’s definitely nice.
A screenshot of the table of contents on Lars Hupel's site. A box with the
words "Series Navigation" contains links to several other pages in the series.
A screenshot of the table of contents on Lars Hupel’s site
[55]
Dialogues
I first came across dialogues on [56]Xe Iaso’s site , but I think I see them
used most often in posts on [57]Faster than Lime . As an example, here’s a
little dialogue on [58]a post about Rust’s futures . At the time of writing, it
looks like this:
A dialogue with "cool bear" on Faster than Lime. The page contains chat bubbles
that alternate between a bear character and the author.
A dialogue with “cool bear” on Faster than Lime
Using dialogues — even for technical writing — is not a particularly novel
idea. I know I’ve seen it in a textbook before; probably this part of [59]
Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces . It can help ask questions from a
less-experienced point of view, and therefore possibly voice concerns that a
reader might themselves be having. And of course — as with “cool bear” and Xe
Iaso’s [60]many characters — it can change the tone and make the page a bit
more fun.
[61]
Code Blocks with Origin
This one was recommended to me by a reader, and so I’ll be talking about my
page specifically!
When I was [62]writing about making a compiler, a reader emailed me and pointed
out that they were getting lost in the various code blocks. My page displayed
the code that I was writing about, but the project had grown beyond a single
file. As a result, I’d be making changes midway through one file at one moment,
and another file the next. This prompted me to add decorators to my code blocks
that look something like this:
From [63]patterns.rb, lines 3 through 8
3 def sum_digits(n)
4 while n > 9
5 n = n.to_s.chars.map(&:to_i).sum
6 end
7 n
8 end
The decorator says what file the code is from, as well as what lines are being
presented. If you click the file name, the decorator links to my Gitea
instance, allowing you to read the code in context.
Though it’s not quite the same (in particular, it’s unfortunately missing
links), the Crafting Interpreters online book does something similar. It
describes changes to the code in words next to the changed code itself, like
“added after MyStruct”. Here’s a screenshot of the page on [64]local variables
at the time of writing.
Location notes on code in Crafting Interpreters. On the right of code blocks, a
margin note describes the file and nature of the change.
Location notes on code in Crafting Interpreters
I think it looks quite elegant, and in some ways — specifically in the verbal
descriptions of what each change does — might be superior to my approach.
It’s not quite the same thing, but [65]GitHub Gists can help approximate this
feature. A Gist could contain multiple files, and each file can be individually
embedded into your page. Hugo in particular has [66]built-in support for Gists
(and I’ve snagged that link using the docs’ [67]easily linkable headings ); I
suspect that other website engines have some form of support as well. At the
time of writing, an embedded Gist looks something like this:
Code embedded in Hugo documentation using a GitHub Gist.
Code embedded in Hugo documentation using a GitHub Gist
Clicking list.html takes you to the source code of the file.
[68]
Bonus: Code Blocks with Clickable Links
If we’re going for fancy code blocks, another fancy feature is provided by the
[69]Agda programming language . Agda can generate HTML code blocks in which
every symbol (like a variable, record name, function name) are linked to where
they are defined. So if you’re reading the code, and wonder “what the heck is
x?”, you can just click it to see how it’s defined.
It’s not simple to integrate Agda’s plain HTML output into an existing webpage,
but some projects do that. I took a stab at it in my [70]post about integrating
it with Hugo. I wager this would be even harder for other languages. However,
it leads to nice results; my go-to is [71]Programming Languages Foundations in
Agda . The online book introduces various concepts from Programming Language
Theory, and each code block that it shows is fully linked. This makes it
possible to jump around the page like so:
Navigating code blocks on a page from PLFA. I hover over then click a plus sign
to see how addition is defined. I then do the same to see how natural numbers
are defined.
Navigating code blocks on a page from PLFA
[72]
Markers for External Links
Some sites I’ve seen mark links that go to a different domain with a little
icon. If you’ve read this far, you’ve likely noticed that my site does the
same. Another good example of this — even though the CSS is little rough at the
time of writing — is [73]James’ Coffee Blog ☕ . I’ve taken the (small) liberty
to adjust the color of the icon, which I suspect is buggy in my browser.
An external link on James' blog. The link is displayed as normal, and an
additional diagonal arrow aiming up and to the right and surrounded by a square
is displayed to the right of the link text.
An external link on James’ blog
Some websites ([DEL:this one included:DEL]) also make such links open in a new
tab automatically. That way, you tend to not lose the original article by
clicking through one of its references.
[74]
Bonus: Different Markers for Different Destinations
[75]Gwern’s website takes this idea further, by changing the icon for external
links depending on the destination. For instance, links to Wikipedia articles
are stylized with a little “W”, links to Haskell.org are stylized using a
lambda (λ\lambdaλ), and links to .zip files have a little archive icon. There
are more; [DEL:I’ve found the [76]link processing code on GitHub , and even the
[77]list of websites that get their own icons .:DEL] I could not find a verbal
description, though.
Edit: Gwern has pointed out that the links I provided go to obsolete code. The
link processing functionality is [78]documented in comments here and the [79]
link icon rules are here . A [80]non-code list of icons exists too.
Now for some pictures. Here are a ton of links from the [81]“About” page!
Links to Wikipedia on Gwern's blog. Each link is followed by a superscript "W".
Links to Wikipedia on Gwern’s site
A link to Haskell.org on Gwern's blog. The link is followed by a superscript
lambda.
A link to Haskell.org on Gwern’s site
Links zip files on Gwern's site. Each link is followed by an archive icon.
Links zip files on Gwern’s site
[82]
Bonus: Link Preview
[83]Gwern’s website has no shortage of cool ideas. Among them showing link
previews on hover. When hovering over a link, the site displays a popup window
that contains a view into that page. I suspect that this view is also archived
somehow, so that it retains a view into the page that matches it at the time of
writing.
To be perfectly honest, I found this feature a little jarring at first. As I
would try to click links, I would get surprised by an additional overlay.
However, as I spent more time browsing the site, I grew quite accustomed to the
previews. I would hover over a link to see the first paragraph and thus get a
short synopsis. This worked really well in tandem with [84]per-destination
marker icons ; I could tell at a glance whether a link was worth hovering over.
Here’s what it looks like:
Hovering over a link on Gwern's site. After the link is hovered over, a
rectangular popup displays a section of the Wikipedia page the link goes to. I
scroll through the section to the table of contents.
Hovering over a link on Gwern’s site
[85]
RSS Feeds
RSS is a feed standard that allows sites to publish updates. Blogs in
particular can make use of RSS to notify readers of updates. RSS feeds are
processed by a feed reader, which is a program that polls a website’s index.xml
file (or other similar files) and reads it to detect new content. If you opt in
to full-text RSS feeds, users can read the entire post entirely from their
reader.
RSS makes it easier to keep up with your site. Rather than having to check in
on every author whose content I enjoy on the internet, I can add their feed URL
to my list, and have my feed reader automatically aggregate all updates for me
to read. It’s kind of like a social media or news feed, except that I control
what’s shown to me, and authors of the blogs I follow don’t need to create
accounts and explicitly share their work on social media!
I don’t have any particular website to show off in this section; instead I’ll
show you a list of websites that I’m following in my feed reader of choice. You
might notice that a lot of these websites are listed here as inspiration for
other microfeatures.
A screenshot of my Feedbin list. Some sites include Hillel Wayne's, Faster than
Lime, Drew DeVault, and the Chapel Language Blog
A screenshot of my Feedbin list
[86]
Links to Other Sites
This feature I first noticed on Drew DeVault’s blog. Every page on Drew’s blog,
at the bottom, has a section titled “Articles from blogs I read”. For instance,
on [87]a sample post , at the time of writing, I’m seeing the following footer:
Links to other blogs from Drew DeVault's blog. The links consist of three
side-by-side boxes, each with a title and brief excerpt.
Links to other blogs from Drew DeVault’s blog
As indicated in the image, Drew’s site in particular uses a program called [88]
openring , which is based on RSS feeds (another [89]microfeature I love ).
However, how the site finds such articles (statically like openring, or on page
load using some JavaScript) isn’t hugely important to me. What’s important is
that you’re promoting other content creators whose work you enjoy, which is the
ethos of my favorite slice of the internet.
[90]
Conclusion + Anything Else?
Those are all the microfeatures that I could think of in a single sitting. I
hope that you have been inspired to integrate features like these into your own
site, or at the very least that you think doing so would be a good idea.
This list isn’t exhaustive. I’ve probably missed some good microfeatures! If
you can think of such a feature, let me know; my email address is linked in the
footer of this article.
Thank you for reading, and cheers!
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Liked this article? Have any questions or comments? Please don't hesitate to
reach out to me at [91]danila.fedorin@gmail.com! I love receiving emails from
readers, and I'm always happy to provide any additional clarification or
assistance.
References:
[1] https://danilafe.com/
[2] https://danilafe.com/about/
[3] https://github.com/DanilaFe
[4] https://danilafe.com/Resume-Danila-Fedorin.pdf
[5] https://danilafe.com/tags/
[6] https://danilafe.com/series/
[7] https://danilafe.com/favorites/
[8] https://danilafe.com/search/
[9] https://danilafe.com/blog/
[10] https://danilafe.com/tags/website/
[11] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#sidenotes
[12] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#tables-of-contents
[13] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#bonus-showing-page-progress
[14] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#easily-linkable-headings
[15] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#grouping-series-of-posts
[16] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#dialogues
[17] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#code-blocks-with-origin
[18] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#bonus-code-blocks-with-clickable-links
[19] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#markers-for-external-links
[20] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#bonus-different-markers-for-different-destinations
[21] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#bonus-link-preview
[22] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#rss-feeds
[23] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#links-to-other-sites
[24] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#conclusion--anything-else
[25] https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/microfeatures-id-like-to-see-in-more-languages/
[26] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#sidenotes
[27] https://gwern.net/me
[28] https://danilafe.com/blog/sidenotes/
[29] https://gwern.net/hydrocephalus
[30] https://gwern.net/hydrocephalus#sn4
[31] https://gwern.net/sidenote
[32] https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
[33] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#tables-of-contents
[34] https://gohugo.io/
[35] https://gohugo.io/methods/page/tableofcontents/
[36] https://fasterthanli.me/
[37] https://fasterthanli.me/articles/understanding-rust-futures-by-going-way-too-deep
[38] https://lars.hupel.info/
[39] https://lars.hupel.info/topics/crdt/01-intro/
[40] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#bonus-showing-page-progress
[42] https://www.quantamagazine.org/
[43] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-square-root-of-2-became-a-number-20240621/
[44] https://css-tricks.com/sticky-table-of-contents-with-scrolling-active-states/
[45] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#easily-linkable-headings
[46] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#sidenotes
[47] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#linked-paragraph
[48] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#tables-of-contents
[49] https://gohugo.io/content-management/markdown-attributes/#overview
[50] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#grouping-series-of-posts
[51] https://chapel-lang.org/blog/
[52] https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/aoc2022-day09-elvish-string-theory/
[53] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#tables-of-contents
[54] https://lars.hupel.info/
[55] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#dialogues
[56] https://xeiaso.net/
[57] https://fasterthanli.me/
[58] https://fasterthanli.me/articles/understanding-rust-futures-by-going-way-too-deep#it-s-waiting-for-the-first-one-to-finish
[59] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/dialogue-virtualization.pdf
[60] https://xeiaso.net/characters
[61] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#code-blocks-with-origin
[62] https://danilafe.com/series/compiling-a-functional-language-using-c++/
[63] https://dev.danilafe.com/Web-Projects/blog-static/src/branch/master/code/patterns/patterns.rb#L3-L8
[64] https://craftinginterpreters.com/local-variables.html
[65] https://gist.github.com/
[66] https://gohugo.io/content-management/shortcodes/#gist
[67] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#easily-linkable-headings
[68] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#bonus-code-blocks-with-clickable-links
[69] https://agda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting-started/what-is-agda.html
[70] https://danilafe.com/blog/agda_hugo/
[71] https://plfa.github.io/
[72] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#markers-for-external-links
[73] https://jamesg.blog/
[74] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#bonus-different-markers-for-different-destinations
[75] https://gwern.net/
[76] https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/959ba9c50d327a960e07241b2c7f13630bf8b80c/js/old/links.js
[77] https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/959ba9c50d327a960e07241b2c7f13630bf8b80c/js/old/links.js#L380-L387
[78] https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/959ba9c50d327a960e07241b2c7f13630bf8b80c/build/LinkIcon.hs#L15
[79] https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/959ba9c50d327a960e07241b2c7f13630bf8b80c/build/Config/LinkIcon.hs#L83
[80] https://gwern.net/lorem-link#link-icons
[81] https://gwern.net/about
[82] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#bonus-link-preview
[83] https://gwern.net/
[84] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#bonus-different-markers-for-different-destinations
[85] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#rss-feeds
[86] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#links-to-other-sites
[87] https://drewdevault.com/2024/05/24/2024-05-24-Bunnix.html
[88] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
[89] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#rss-feeds
[90] https://danilafe.com/blog/blog_microfeatures/#conclusion--anything-else
[91] mailto:danila.fedorin@gmail.com

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[36]Politics
The Limits Of The Billionaire Imagination Are Everyone’s Problem
[37][Vic]
By [38]David Roth
3:46 PM EDT on March 24, 2023
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Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreessen onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt
festival in 2016.Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch
[44]
309Comments
There's no good reason to think about what I would do if I was rich enough to
own a magazine, and a number of better and much more urgent reasons not to
think about it at all. The most obvious of those is that while I am not rich, I
already sort of own [45]something that is sort of like that, and so there is
usually something I could be doing there that's more useful than musing over
what I might might do as, say, the gentleman publisher of a small literary
journal called The Peppermill Review or Frontispiece or a political quarterly
named Publius or I guess Frontispiece could also work here. But there's another
reason not to bother with this particular daydream, which is that being that
rich would seem to render the idea moot.
I am just going by what I see, here. The people in our culture with enough
money to do whatever they want—the sort of objectively immoral benefactor-grade
wealth that is currently warping and cheapening our public life through its own
obscene scope and its owners' relentless craven self-interest—seem
categorically opposed to doing anything interesting with it. Or, anyway, they
seem opposed to doing anything more interesting than watching that money grow
and maybe remarking upon how that experience of all that having and watching
has been for them. It may be that all that dull abundance has flooded their
circuits, leaving them incapable not just of wanting anything but more of what
they already have, but unable even to imagine anything else that a person might
want. They also just might not care about anything but each other, and their
stuff. Because these people and what they want are so determinedly
uninteresting, it's not a very interesting question; because what they do is so
strange, it's natural to wonder if maybe all that money, and all the time spent
thinking about it, hasn't been good for them.
In a non-material sense, I mean. Materially they are doing great, and the
liberating civic atrophy that was the goal of their rich-guy forebears—the
seething gray men gone by who [46]spent their money creating and promoting the
incoherent, prissy-vicious, intermittently libertarian politics to which this
class mostly subscribes—has softened not just the state but the broader culture
into something that can only glancingly inconvenience them. The "not good for
them" part is the way in which all that ease and all those eager supplicants,
the warm bath of clubby gossip and passive income in which they've all gone
pruney, has shrunken and shortened them. They prosper and prosper and [47]speak
bitterly about how unappreciated they are, but they seem somehow incomplete.
It's as if the money had crowded something important out.
They keep busy. Generally they pass their money around the rich person
community in various ways—investments, patronage, lawsuits, alimony, [48]weird
political stunts—and sometimes spend some on lobbying designed to guarantee
that nothing they or their businesses do will ever become more inconvenient or
subject to public scrutiny. Even when and where this bustling uselessness
produces something the broader public could notionally use—a big building with
a rich person's name on it in big letters, say—there isn't really much mystery
to why. The answer is already right there to read, in big letters.
This super-class's singular drive to preserve and affirm a status quo that
doesn't serve anyone but themselves speaks for itself, and it is fucking always
talking. You can look at a wary and confused culture overrun by financialized
rot and recursive grievance and raw sadism, and at a politics mostly concerned
with managing that miserable status quo while maintaining the maximum in
Punishment Capacity. And then you can look at the objectively mediocre and
preposterously wealthy people so anxiously and imperiously presiding over it,
and venture a pretty confident guess about the effects of letting the broader
culture not just soak in all that stagnant wealth but move mostly according to
whatever currents periodically stir its surface.
This is where inequality and the politics it's bought becomes not an
abstraction but a fact of daily life. That this class does not really make or
do anything—or make anything but a nine percent annual return every year, or do
anything but congratulate itself and groan about how unfair its critics are—is
everyone's problem, because those idle demands made on high arrive downhill,
onto the rest of us, as an avalanche. Or, less metaphorically, as layoffs, and
austerity, and ever more optimized and anti-human efficiencies, and a
claustrophobic and airless culture being squashed flat by their algorithms and
incuriosity. If this class had less power, the obvious limits of their
imagination would mostly be their problem; because they have so much, those
limits wind up imposed on everyone else. We are all [49]trapped in there, with
them.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Because these extremely rich people mostly just talk to each other, and because
they mostly have the sort of bad ideas that a person might have if the only
people they knew also hung out in Marc Andreessen's Twitter mentions all day
saying "absolutely" and "indeed," their big ideas lately tend to register
mostly as abstractions when they register at all. "The average person’s life is
changed when the things they do each day are both faster and better," [50]Ed
Zitron wrote in his newsletter, "and it’s hard to point to products that have
meaningfully done that in quite some time." The money still moves, but it's
hard to say to what end. Sometimes one of these entities invests in another
one, or consumes it. Sometimes a half-dozen nearly identical companies show up
promising to have a man on a bike bring you a pint of ice cream at any time of
day, in 10 minutes, or eight, or six, and then a few months later they are all
gone.
It is important, if also pretty funny, to remember that the very rich people
doing all this stuff believe that they are shaping the future by doing it.
Normal people just, like, work and consume and live wherever they live and do
whatever it is they do, while at the same time 300 men in fleece vests push
history forward in world-historically wack Slack channels or by writing things
like "Web 4?" on dry-erase boards. When the people ruling this moment dare to
imagine what the next might be like, the result is almost poignant in its
childish shabbiness—a colony on another planet for them to rule; a new type of
money [51]for them to have; a wholly digital world in which they could charge
rent and [52]convene meetings or, when the rest of humanity [53]decided that
didn't sound cool at all, a future in which a predictive text generator they
have deemed artificial intelligence, an algorithm somehow trained to [54]get
upset and [55]botch easy logic questions, could efficiently obviate all those
messy and inefficient and disagreeable other people. Of course there's [56]no
real art in that future, although the rich men plowing millions of dollars into
[57]grimly de-aging their bodies so they can be rich forever suggests that
David Cronenberg's work might at least survive in spirit.
It is axiomatic that these people get bored extremely easily. They are panicky
and fad-prone and gossipy and move as a herd; the billionaires who see
themselves as anointed change-makers and shapers of the world to come get upset
about the same fake-o bullshit that keeps Fox News casualties indoors on sunny
days. The billionaire venture capitalist with a bugout compound in New Zealand
and a portfolio of future-shaping disruptions grouses in private about Critical
Race Theory In The Schools and shoplifters at Walgreens in cities in which they
do not live, but they naturally prefer more richly marbled fare. Their [58]pet
intellectuals tell them that they are being robbed by the masses and deserve to
live as kings; their [59]chosen political candidates say it, too. Some of them
have lately become concerned that the predictive text generator they like is
[60]politically biased against them. These people talk (and talk, and talk)
online in more or less the same register as the average Cobra Commander
monologue. If there is anything useful about their discourse, it has less to do
with the substance than the shape of it; both are [61]absolutely off-the-rack
conservative rich person lorem ipsum stuff, and profoundly grating and dull as
such, but the familiarity is instructive.
Recently, an influential corner of this cohort [62]caused a bank run by
abruptly pulling their money from the one bank at which, implausibly, all of
them seemed to do all their business. When the bank collapsed, they took turns
posting that its collapse was an extinction-level threat to the nation's
economy, and a national security issue, and perhaps also a threat to the planet
itself. The bank was [63]a self-dealing mess, as it turns out, but so was the
community it served. All of them plainly regarded [64]both the best practices
and the literal laws that govern this kind of thing as nothing they'd have to
worry about. Some of this is hubris, and some of this is just assessing how the
reality they've purchased actually works. They're awful, but they're not really
wrong. Of course they were bailed out.
The story of that bank run is already in its woozy afterlife. Some other wobbly
and variously shitty banks were absorbed into bigger banks; those tended to be
both highly exposed to the things this super-class likes (cryptocurrency, most
notably) and dedicated to servicing their weird whims. Fox News started blaming
those failures on woke-ism and then just moved on to other outrages; there were
briefly [65]vague intimations of potential legislative fixes to the stupid laws
that made the collapse possible; there are lingering questions, none of which
seem likely to be answered anytime soon, about why, as one Silicon Valley
investor put it, all these extremely powerful and influential venture
capitalists were "letting all of their companies put all of their money in
one—I mean, best case—[66]C-minus financial institution."
There has been kind of a lot of this lately: crises that don't quite resolve
into crises, things that are clearly bad but somehow not in ways that
necessarily lead to any learning or change. So much depends upon things staying
more or less the same, and things generally do. Again, this reality was
purchased, at a surprisingly low price and over the course of just a few
generations, by the class of heedless and wildly distractible dunces that it
keeps on absolving. It would be much easier to appreciate the low satire of all
it if everyone wasn't living not so much with as within the consequences of it.
It's not just about so few people having so much of everything, although that
is plenty odious and offensive on its merits. The problem, as it is experienced
moment by moment and day by day, is how little they have done with it, and how
little what they have done with it has done for everyone else. That inequality,
when compounded over time and amplified by the cretinous and absolutely joyless
mediocrity of the people in whose accounts that compounding gets done, winds up
not just freezing the world in place, but shrinking it to the size of their own
incuriosity. Sometimes this is more obvious than others—a billionaire buys and
closes [67]a publication about books; a Koch scion with literary ambitions gets
bored with her literary journal, scuppers it, and is treated to a strange
feature in the New York Times about [68]her pivot to wellness. Mostly it
reveals itself in the negative; squint and you can almost see the possibilities
that might have happened, but didn't, trailing in the wake of the useless
things they launch as those innovations describe their familiar course up and
then down.
There's more than one obvious problem with this, but keeping all this wealth in
the same small and tremendously prideful network—in the same bank!—is grounded
in the idea that only the people who have all this power and influence would
know what to do with it. That belief has persisted within that community, and
to a distressing degree outside of it as well, despite what is by now copious
evidence that all this new elite really wants to do with that money is gamble
it amongst themselves and find new methods and venues to charge everyone else
rent. If these billionaires are correct in their perception that the general
public has increasingly had it with them, it's worth noting that some of that
is just a natural response to being insulted. How else, I wonder, did they
expect people to react upon being told that their betters saw them as so much
surplus, and their aspirations—the finer ones, and also just the basic
dignities that people naturally believe they deserve—as impracticalities, or
debris on the road ahead.
If this class seems about spent in its creative capacity, that is by no means
true of the rest of humanity. It is easy to see the conflict this creates: a
small group sitting atop a vast supply of resources, doing nothing much, and a
larger, striving group thinks about what better use that all might be put
toward. "Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power
which holds it hostage," the critic Adrienne Rich wrote, and [69]the
screenwriter Charlie Kaufman quoted at the Writers Guild of America Awards. He
was receiving a lifetime achievement award from the organization, but also
speaking as a member of a union [70]getting ready to strike.
Already a user?[71]Log in
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[81][Vic]
[82]David Roth[83]@david_j_roth
Editor. Co-host of The Distraction.
Read More:
• [84]Our Mediocre Elites,
• [85]Rich People Things,
• [86]silicon valley,
• [87]The App That Brings You Ice Cream,
• [88]The Future
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[103]
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[104]Why Your Team Sucks
[105]
Why Your Team Sucks 2024: Indianapolis Colts
[106]277Comments
[107][dre]
[108]Drew Magary
August 12, 2024
[109]Indianapolis Colts Quarterback Anthony Richardson (5) looks on during the
NFL Preseason game between the Denver Broncos and the Indianapolis Colts on
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[110]Racing
[111]
NASCAR Driver Goes Hungry Uncle Mode In Overtime To Steal A Controversial
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[112]85Comments
[113][Pro]
[114]Chris Thompson
August 12, 2024
[115]Austin Dillon and Joey Logano drive side by side.
[116]Olympics
[117]
Who Is 3×3 Olympic Basketball For?
[118]99Comments
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[120]Patrick T. Dorsey
August 12, 2024
[121]Hailey van Lith #9 of Team United States attempts to fight past a screen
by Gracia Alonso #44 of Team Spain while Sandra Ygueravide #13 of Team Spain
drives past during a Women's 3x3 basketball semifinal game between the United
States and Spain on day ten of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 at Esplanade Des
Invalides on August 05, 2024 in Paris, France.
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[44] https://defector.com/the-limits-of-the-billionaire-imagination-are-everyones-problem#coral_thread
[45] http://defector.com/
[46] https://defector.com/billionaire-who-broke-the-world-lol-oops
[47] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-03-24/column-how-afraid-should-silicon-valley-be
[48] https://www.businessinsider.com/anti-woke-bank-backed-peter-thiel-folds-after-three-months-2022-11
[49] https://defector.com/everything-is-silicon-valley-now
[50] https://ez.substack.com/p/the-uncanny-valley
[51] https://defector.com/cryptocurrency-bad-and-weird
[52] https://defector.com/facebook-meta-asks-wouldnt-it-be-nice-to-die
[53] https://defector.com/meta-will-continue-burning-billions-of-dollars-until-something-happens
[54] https://time.com/6256529/bing-openai-chatgpt-danger-alignment/
[55] https://mobile.twitter.com/IMAO_/status/1628534439071318016
[56] https://defector.com/ai-art-only-looks-like-art-if-you-dont-care
[57] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-25/anti-aging-techniques-taken-to-extreme-by-bryan-johnson?leadSource=uverify%20wall
[58] https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/curtis-yarvin-thiel-carlyle-monarchism-reactionary
[59] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/blake-masters-peter-thiel-donald-trump-arizona-senate-mark-kelly/
[60] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/24/woke-ai-chatgpt-culture-war/
[61] https://defector.com/the-eternal-mystery-of-a-rich-mans-politics/
[62] https://defector.com/the-collapse-of-silicon-valley-bank-is-testing-techs-loudest-evangelists
[63] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-21/svb-s-loans-to-insiders-tripled-to-219-million-before-it-failed
[64] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-13/svb-couldn-t-ignore-its-losses-but-the-fed-can
[65] https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-13-silicon-valley-bank-bailout-deregulation/
[66] https://www.businessinsider.com/vcs-almost-took-the-whole-system-down-billionaire-ceo-2023-3
[67] https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/91526-catapult-to-shutter-online-magazine-writing-classes.html#:~:text=Catapult%20has%20announced%20that%20it,%2C%20and%20Soft%20Skull%20Press.%22
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[69] https://deadline.com/2023/03/wga-awards-charlie-kaufman-1235279921/
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[1]
Marius Hauken
• [2]Blog
• [3]About
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• [5]Work
[paren]
Time travelling for parents
16 Jul 2024 • about 1.5 minutes reading
[parent-per] Parenthood is the ultimate paradox. Nothing is more wonderful,
nothing is more challenging. My third child is now 2 months old, and we’re
drowning in sleepless nights and endless cries where we don’t know what to do.
But I’ve found two perspective shifters that reveal the magic in the mayhem:
1. The 80-Year-Old You
Close your eyes. You’re 80. Your joints creak and your kids are grown.
Suddenly, you’re time travelling back to now. This moment, with a crying baby
and bags under your eyes. How much wouldn’t you give to be back in this exact
moment?
2. The Last Time Illusion
One day, you’ll pick up your child for the last time. You’ll change the last
diaper, give the last piggyback ride, read the last bedtime story. But this is
the crucial point: You will never know it’s the last time when it happens.
It’ll slip by, unnoticed.
Embracing the Chaos
Night wakenings have become my trigger for these perspective shifts. When the 2
AM cry jolts me awake, I pause and imagine my 80-year-old self, cherishing this
fleeting moment of midnight connection. It doesn’t magically erase the
exhaustion, but it does make those hushed, drowsy moments feel more meaningful.
One day, you’ll miss these endless crying sessions. You’ll long for reading
that same book for the 20th time. These chaotic moments are the good old days
in disguise.
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• [9]
Kids mode for iPhone and iPad
A great tips for vacation (and frankly everyday life) is learning how
Guided Access makes your life easier when kids borrow your iPhone or iPad
[child]
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Why selling our car and buying a cargo bike is the best investment we've
ever done
Three years ago we sold our car and bought two e-bikes as a replacement.
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Blog
8/10/2024 2:10:16 AM
A Diminishing Portfolio of Enthusiasms
John P. Weiss / [28]14 Comments
Topics: [29]Aging | [30]death | [31]Encouragement | [32]Hope | [33]inspiration
| [34]Introspection | [35]Jim Harrison | [36]Life | [37]Life lessons | [38]
Wisdom | [39]Thomas McGuane
Everyone disburses
[47118_5740]
Selfie of me and my mother
My mother’s room was on the third floor at Sunrise Senior Living.
The third floor is the memory care unit because everyone living there has some
form of dementia, except for my mother. Her body was shriveled up and mostly
frozen from late-stage Parkinson’s disease, but her mind was sharp.
When we first moved to Nevada and I was choosing an assisted living community
for my mother, Sunrise Senior Living stood out as the most beautiful and
professional. But they only had two rooms available—one on the second floor,
and one on the third floor.
My wife, a hospice nurse, recommended we select the third-floor unit.
“But that’s the memory care unit. Everyone there has dementia or some form of
memory loss,” I told my wife.
“I know, but that means the staff-to-patient ratio will be higher. And since
she can’t walk or leave her room, she’ll see the staff more. You know how
social your Mom is,” my wife said.
My wife is brilliant.
We chose the third-floor room, and sure enough, Mom loved it. There were views
of the mountains outside her bedroom window, and the staff loved visiting with
her because she was outgoing and of sound mind.
I frequently visited Mom and brought her cupcakes, snacks, and new books to
read. And when she could no longer hold books, I hired a woman to come and read
to her. But then she and the woman became good friends and often spent an hour
chatting, which was fine with me.
All I wanted was for my mother to be comfortable and happy.
We’re both still here, for now
In the last year of my mother’s life, she loved to reminisce and talk about the
past.
Sometimes it’s unhealthy to wallow in the past or romanticize days gone by with
rosy retrospection. You can get stuck there, and forget how to live in the
present. But when your life is reduced to a bed and four walls, sometimes the
past is all you can escape into.
Mom would tell me about the old haunts in Long Island where she grew up and
used to play at the beach. I’d bring my iPad during our visits, look up those
old places, and show Mom photos and videos. This delighted Mom, and soon we
were looking up her old friends, “to see if they’re still alive,” Mom would say
with a laugh.
We found one of her childhood friends, Elsie, and even located a phone number.
We called, and amazingly, Elsie answered.
For the next thirty minutes or so, Mom and Elsie traversed the landscape of
their early days and all the fun they had in the sun and surf of Long Island,
New York. As they spoke, I envisioned the sunny skies and seagulls flying over
them. I heard the surf crashing on the beach not far from their blanket on the
sand where their picnic lunch included sandwiches, sodas, and laughter.
Eventually, my Mom and Elsie said their goodbyes.
After the phone call, Mom became a bit quiet and reflective. Then she looked at
me and said, “You don’t know how wonderful those years are until they’re gone.
Most everyone disappears.”
“Well, we found Elsie. She’s still here,” I said.
Mom nodded in agreement, looked out the window, and said, “We’re both still
here, for now.”
Freshen up your feelings about being alive
On the shelves in my home library are several books by the late author [40]Jim
Harrison, perhaps best known for his novella, [41]“Legends of the Fall,” which
became a movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt.
Harrison was a friend of the late painter [42]Russell Chatham, whose beautiful
tonalist paintings adorn the covers of many Harrison novels. Harrison and
Chatham appeared once in an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s popular television
series, “Parts Unknown.”
In the episode, the three talked about food and life, as they enjoyed an
amazing home-cooked meal and loads of wine. Sadly, Harrison died not long after
that episode.
On his [43]website, Bourdain wrote the following about Jim Harrison:
“Shortly after the filming of this episode, Jim passed away, only a few
months after the death of his beloved wife of many years, Linda. It is very
likely that this is the last footage taken of him. To the very end, he ate
like a champion, smoked like a chimney, lusted (at least in his heart)
after nearly every woman he saw, drank wine in quantities that would be
considered injudicious in a man half his age, and most importantly, got up
and wrote each and every day—brilliant, incisive, thrilling sentences and
verses that will live forever. He died, I am told, with pen in hand.”
Recently, a thoughtful reader of my work sent me an email with a link to a
documentary titled, “All That Is Sacred.” [44]IMDb.com described the film as
follows:
“In the late 1960s, poets, writers, and musicians descend upon Key West to
pursue their love of literature and fishing (and cocaine and acid). Tom
McGuane is soon joined by friends Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, Russell
Chatham, and Jimmy Buffett. They create some of their generation’s best
art.”
Watch the documentary trailer below.
It’s a wonderful documentary with interviews and film footage from long ago
when all these writers and artists were young, full of life and promise. But we
also see a few of them, the ones still alive, wistfully reflecting on those
earlier days of fun and friendship.
And then the film shares the following quote from Jim Harrison:
“We go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms.”
Harrison goes on to say that we must seek, “jolts of enormous electricity,” to
“freshen up your feelings about being alive.”
In other words, don’t melt into your couch and stop living. Don’t give up on
life just because your portfolio of enthusiasms has diminished. There are
always ways to squeeze more out of life, even if you’re old and less able to do
the things you used to.
We have to make the special moments count.
The astonishing thing about growing old is that everyone disburses
My mother never let Parkinson’s disease or her contorted body stand in the way
of enjoying a great conversation or buttercream cupcakes and cheesecake.
[1]Mom and her desserts. Photo:[45] John P. Weiss
Mom kept up on the news, enjoyed discussing politics and books, and often
dispensed life lessons and advice for the young assisted living staff members
who came to her to share boyfriend problems or other worries.
No doubt, Mom probably confronted her own diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms,
but she always had the capacity to bounce back. She made new friends, even
though so many of her old friends were disappearing.
In the “All That Is Sacred” documentary, writer Thomas McGuane says the
following:
“The astonishing thing about growing old is that everyone disburses.”
Sadly, I have found this to be true.
Retirement and aging mean that people often move. Some pass away. Others lose
touch because their lives have changed, and new priorities emerge, like
grandkids, doctor appointments, and such.
What do we do when confronted with this diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms
and everyone disburses?
We follow Jim Harrison’s lead. We make new friends. We enjoy good food and
drink. We celebrate the great outdoors. We continue loving those close to us,
including our animal companions.
And most importantly, we continue to embrace our creative passions. To the best
of our ability.
Jim Harrison, despite his aging and decrepit body, got up every day to write by
hand. On his last day, before a heart attack ushered him beyond the veil, he
was seated at his writing desk with pen in hand composing a poem.
Now that’s the way to go out.
[47118_5633]
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Comments
14 Responses to A Diminishing Portfolio of Enthusiasms
[57][20]
my mom working on a piece of art a week before she passed at 93::
[58]https://vimeo.com/509576413/0d86416709?share=copy
Posted by [59]Walter Paul Bebirian · via [60]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[61][73]
Just beautiful. I read your writing every Saturday. I look forward to it! I
love when you write about your Mother!
Posted by [62]Frankie Jackson · via [63]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[64][46]
I know I have said it before ... "This is one of the best you have written!" I
shared it to my FB page because I believe in all that you have written here...
having lost my Mom three years ago, and Dad three years before that. These
things you mention are extremely important... life is so worth living!
Posted by [65]Marsha Hamby Savage · via [66]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[67][b0]
John - you write beautifully, and I thank you for sharing your talent with us.
This essay contains important lessons to help us maneuver life's ups and downs.
Posted by [68]Donna Skeels Cygan · via [69]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[70][af]
Great piece, John. My mom turns 90 in September and I'm planning a surprise
party with her remaining friends and family (don't tell her!). She had six
sisters and three brothers. Only four remain and she's the oldest still living.
In sending out the invites, I was aware of the people who have "dispersed". Mom
is still sharp and we speak regularly. I greatly enjoy when she tells stories
of her life and have tried to record some of them. I'm sentimental like her and
know that in years to come, I will be playing them back. But for now, I just
want to appreciate her today.
Posted by Jim Edmonds · via [71]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[72][8d]
I can't help it, I always smile when I see a picture of your mom. How precious
she is all dressed up with her hair coifed, her pearls, and always a smile. She
reminds me so much of my mom. I think they would have been great friends. The
city girl from Long Island, and the farm girl from Washington would have shared
stories of life and love spending the afternoon lounging over their favorite
desert and a cup of coffee!
Posted by [73]Ron · via [74]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[75][15]
What a beautiful essay, particularly your lovely and loving writing about your
mom! I read a book a while back , Live Life in Crescendo, I believe the title
was, that embraced this essay's main point - even as you age, keep discovering
and contributing. Thank you John, for this insightful writing today.
Posted by Shirley · via [76]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[77][av]
This one really hit the mark today! I forgot how much change and adventure is
needed so I don't become so sedentary! I can keep my mind busy most days but
occasionally a person needs the extraordinary to feel that enthusiasm of life
as time goes on day to day.
Posted by julie · via [78]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[79][4f]
What a wonderful way to be ushered into your meaningful and poetic stories.
Recently, life has been keeping me too busy for much of anything beyond the
necessaries. Thank you for the fresh breath
Posted by Ruby Boddie · via [80]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[81][bf]
I really think life is more enjoyable if lived fully! I loved the message of
this article! It's not only up to me, but in my power, to make the most of my
life, and how I approach living is how I will experience life. I am a product
of my own viewpoints. But I would like to make a comment about admiring Jim
Harrison. Yes, his natural talent and serious devotion to writing gained him a
large audience, but I want to challenge admiration of his lifestyle. As someone
who has lived a lifestyle of rapacious unrestrained lascivious abandon, and as
someone who has also experienced the greatest sort of adventure, fulfillment,
and accomplishment practicing a different sort of lifestyle guided by diligent,
clean, and healthy, nourishing and enriched abundance, I would like to assert
that to admire his behavior is misguided. He may have been a great and
accomplished writer, but to what higher planes and novel achievements may he
have reached if he cared for his mind and body? Such a great potential as
Harrison possessed was surely sadly less than the lofty or ground-breaking
writing he would have produced if he took good care of himself? I will soften
this remark by saying that it is each person's responsibility to make decisions
about who they are, and for all I know, he has lived the most glorious
existence of any person ever, but I can't fail to speak up for the lessons
learned from my own life
Posted by Leslie Elizabeth Taylor · via [82]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[83][3e]
Jim was part of a circle of movie people I mingled with, as was Sam Shepherd
and Buck Henry, among others. . He had an aura of melancholy.. Gentle, deeply
kind, an empathic listener he was often quiet in the middle of groups. His
personality seemed deeply rooted in the Northern Woods. I loved the simplicity
of his books. They were bare boned and raw. Ruthlessly carved down to the
sacred heart of the characters and their stories. I especially loved Legends of
the Fall. He drank his whiskey with one ice cube and leaned in while talking to
a friend.
Posted by Sam Crespi · via [84]johnpweiss.com · 2 days ago
[85][45]
Love this! It is entirely possible to live well in old age, even with a
"diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms." Attitude is everything. My mother
taught me by example, and I am practicing now. Greet each day with gratitude
and look for its gifts. Don't focus on what you've lost; relish what you still
have. Notice people. Engage. And by all means, eat dessert and keep writing!
Posted by [86]Aileen Gronewold · via [87]johnpweiss.com · 1 day ago
[88][4d]
I look to your Saturday letters every week. They inspire me to live life better
and notice the important things around me. I also love your cartoons. Please
keep adding them!
Posted by Betty · via [89]johnpweiss.com · 12 hours ago
[90][2d]
I love this piece and your writing in general. I have stockpiled several of
your letters so that I may enjoy them slowly and in depth. I purchased your
first book and am looking forward to the release of The Morning Fox soon.
Posted by [91]Meg Volk · via [92]johnpweiss.com · 2 hours ago
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[40] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Harrison
[41] https://www.amazon.com/Legends-Fall-Jim-Harrison/dp/0802126227/ref=asc_df_0802126227/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=692875362841&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12005831232321227983&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9198064&hvtargid=pla-2281435178538&psc=1&mcid=15680b19171b3190a2531d19cd6a5b06&hvocijid=12005831232321227983-0802126227-&hvexpln=73&gad_source=1
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[43] https://explorepartsunknown.com/montana/bourdains-field-notes-montana/
[44] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28866877/
[45] https://johnpweiss.com/email-newsletter
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[49] https://johnpweiss.com/blog/187270/life-is-so-terrible-and-beautiful-at-the-same-time
[50] https://johnpweiss.com/blog/193736/the-unheard-songs-of-life
[51] https://johnpweiss.com/blog/191812/days-of-grace
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[64] https://johnpweiss.com/comment/195032
[65] http://www.marshasavage.com/
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[68] http://donnaskeelscygan.com/
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[70] https://johnpweiss.com/comment/195034
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[86] https://comeonaileenblog.com/
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[24]Newsletter
AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool
justifies the harm.
[25] Molly White
[26]Molly White
Apr 17, 2024 — 15 min read
AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
audio-thumbnail
AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
0:00
/1311.164082
[29][0 ]1×[33][100 ]
Listen to a voiceover of this post, [34]download the recording for later, or
[35]subscribe to the feed in your podcast app.
As someone known for my criticism of the previous deeply flawed technology to
become the subject of the tech world's overinflated aspirations, I have had
people express surprise when I've remarked that generative artificial
intelligence tools^[36]a can be useful. In fact, I was a little surprised
myself.
But there is a yawning gap between "AI tools can be handy for some things" and
the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically
reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large
language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument
that "well, they can sometimes be handy..." doesn't offer much of a
justification.
Some are surprised when they discover I don't think blockchains are useless,
either. Like so many technologies, blockchains are designed to prioritize a few
specific characteristics (coordination among parties who don't trust one
another, censorship-resistance, etc.) at the expense of many others (speed,
cost, etc.). And as they became trendy, people often used them for purposes
where their characteristics weren't necessary — or were sometimes even unwanted
— and so they got all of the flaws with none of the benefits. The thing with
blockchains is that the things they are suited for are not things I personally
find to be terribly desirable, such as the massive casinos that have emerged
around gambling on token prices, or financial transactions that cannot be
reversed.
When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to
my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to
do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might,
and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that
beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than
blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.
[37]Subscribe
I've been slow to get around to writing about artificial intelligence in any
depth, mostly because I've been trying to take the time to interrogate my own
knee-jerk response to a clearly overhyped technology. After spending so much
time writing about a niche that's practically all hype with little practical
functionality, it's all too easy to look at such a frothy mania around a
different type of technology and assume it's all the same.
In the earliest months of the LLM mania, my ethical concerns about the tools
made me hesitant to try them at all. When my early tests were met with mediocre
to outright unhelpful results, I'll admit I was quick to internally dismiss the
technology as more or less useless. It takes time to experiment with these
models and learn how to prompt them to produce useful outputs,^[38]b and I just
didn't have that time then.^[39]c But as the hype around AI has grown, and with
it my desire to understand the space in more depth, I wanted to really
understand what these tools can do, to develop as strong an understanding as
possible of their potential capabilities as well as their limitations and
tradeoffs, to ensure my opinions are well-formed.
I, like many others who have experimented with or adopted these products, have
found that these tools actually can be pretty useful for some tasks. Though AI
companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be
able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or
develop a video game from scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are
handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some
tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.
Still, I do think acknowledging the usefulness is important, while also holding
companies to account for their false or impossible promises, abusive labor
practices, and myriad other issues. When critics dismiss AI outright, I think
in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and
benefited from AI tools think "wait, that's not been my experience at all".
Use cases
I've found AI tools to be useful to my writing, though not for the actual
writing bit. When I'm writing, I often find myself with a word on the "tip of
my tongue" (so to speak), and I've had more success with ChatGPT than with
Google for these circumstances — although I can usually find the word with
Google if I try hard enough.
[Screenshot-2024-04-16-at-4]User: What's a word for something that will not
affect the final outcome Assistant: Inconsequential
Like many people, I also find it challenging to proofread my own writing, and I
sometimes miss typos or weird grammar accidentally left in from changing a
sentence halfway through.
USER Please proofread the following text and point out any spelling or grammar
problems, typos, and other such issues. Do not change the tone of the writing
or try to adjust the reading level. Do not repeat the entire corrected text
back to me, simply identify with brief quotes of the flawed text where changes
need to be made. <document> Bitcoiners are all aflutter as the halving date
approaches in about a week. This is very exciting for them, because the past
three halvings look like they've precipitated major price increases
(particularly if you use a log scale, which bitcoiners love). Bitcoin prices in
linear scale (blue) and log scale (black) since 2010, with halvings marked by
the red lines (chart via Bitbo) The "halving" is the moment when bitcoin block
rewards that is, the amount of bitcoin issued as a reward to the miner for
successfully mining a block are reduced by half. This is a strategy to ensure
the total supply of bitcoin gradually tapers... RESPONSE Here are the spelling,
grammar, and typo issues I found in the text: 1. "kind of the thought process"
should be "kind of thought process" 2. "beliefs of guaranteed double-your-money
returns" should be "belief of guaranteed double-your-money returns" 3. "2024"
is used instead of "2023" in several places, likely typos: • "Notice of appeal
filed on April 11, 2024." • "Letter motion filed on April 8, 2024." • "Tweet by
Inner City Press, April 9, 2024." • "Tweet by Inner City Press, April 12,
2024." • "Order filed on April 8, 2024." 4. "Committee on Committee on Banking"
should be "Committee on Banking" 5. "consider proposals" should be "considers
proposals" 6. "BitBoy" Armstrong's name is inconsistently capitalized as
"Bitboy" in one instance 7. "coinflips" should be "coin flips" 8. There is an
inconsistency in the number of Web3 is Going Just Great entries between April 1
and April 12. The text states "11 entries" but only 7 are listed.Proofreading a
newsletter post with Anthropic's Claude model
LLMs are pretty decent at proofreading, and although they sometimes spit out a
few false positives, this example from proofreading my most recent recap issue
shows where it caught several mistakes (points 1, 2, 4, and 8; point 5 was also
a genuine error, but it was within a quote).
However, I don't think I need generative AI to do this, either. There are a lot
of proofreading tools^[40]d that work quite well, and, helpfully, don't invent
errors that weren't in the original text (as I've found the ChatGPT models are
particularly wont to do).
Coding has been the far more compelling use case for me. Copilot, Github's AI
coding assistant, integrates directly into VSCode and other [41]IDEs. I've also
played with using the more general models, like ChatGPT, for coding tasks. They
are certainly flawed — Copilot has an annoying habit of "hallucinating"
(fabricating) imports instead of deferring to VSCode's perfectly good non-AI
auto-import, for example — but in other cases they are genuinely helpful.
I've found these tools to be particularly good at simple tasks that would
normally pull me out of my workflow to consult documentation or StackOverflow,
like generating finicky CSS selectors or helping me craft database aggregation
operations. On at least one occasion, they've pointed me towards useful
functionality I never knew about and wouldn't even think to look up. They're
also great at saving you some typing by spitting out the kind of boilerplate-y
code you have to write for things like new unit tests.
The tools can also do the kind of simple, repetitive tasks I'd previously write
a quick script to do for me — or they can generate that quick script. For
example, here's me asking ChatGPT to write a quick Python script to turn my
blogroll OPML file into the JSON file I wanted while I was adding a [42]
blogroll page to my website:
Suggest some python code to turn an OPML file like this into a JSON file with
fields for "text", "xmlUrl", and "htmlUrl": <opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>
Feeds of molly.white5 tagged as Blogroll from Inoreader [https://
www.inoreader.com]</title> </head> <body> <outline text="Blogroll" title=
"Blogroll"> <outline text="Adactio" title="Adactio" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://
adactio.com/rss/" htmlUrl="https://adactio.com/"/> <outline text="Anil Dash"
title="Anil Dash" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.dashes.com/AnilDash" htmlUrl
="https://dashes.com/anil/"/> <outline text="Ben Werdmüller" title="Ben
Werdmüller" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://werd.io/?_t=rss" htmlUrl="https://
werd.io/"/> <outline text="Birch Tree" title="Birch Tree" type="rss" xmlUrl=
"https://birchtree.me/rss/" htmlUrl="https://birchtree.me/"/> <outline text=
"cabel.com" title="cabel.com" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://cabel.com/feed/"
htmlUrl="https://cabel.com"/>
After changing the feeds.opml file path to the location of the file on my
computer, the code it suggested worked without any modification:
ASSISTANT python import xml.etree.Element Tree as ET import json tree =
ET.parse('feeds.opml') root = tree.getroot() feeds = for outline in
root.findall('.//outline'): feed = { 'text': outline.attrib.get('text'),
'xmlUrl': outline.attrib.get('xmlUrl"), 'htmlUrl': outline.attrib.get
('htmlUrl') } feeds.append(feed) json_data = json.dumps(feeds, indent=4) with
open('feeds.json', 'w') as f: f.write(json_data) This code will read the OPML
file 'feeds.opml', extract the 'text', 'xmlUrl', and 'htmlUrl' attributes from
each outline element, and save the data into a JSON file 'feeds.json' with
proper indentation.
Besides my own experimentation, others are using these tools in ways that are
really hard to argue aren't useful. Someone I know in real life has told me
about creating a custom model based on their own emails, which they then query
as needed, or use to create some fairly boilerplate documents they previously
had to spend hours on. Open source developer Simon Willison has been
documenting his own AI coding experiments on his blog, and has described how
LLMs have [43]made him more ambitious with his projects and more likely to
embark on what he calls "[44]sidequests".^[45]e Sumana Harihareswara [46]uses
OpenAI's speech recognition tools to create subtitles for her videos and
recorded talks, or to "mine" them for material she can later reuse. Elsewhere
on the internet, those who speak English as a second language have spoken of
LLMs' usefulness in revising their professional communications. Others use it
to summarize meeting notes. Some use it as a starting point for documentation.
Reality check
Despite some unarguably useful features, the limitations of these tools make
themselves readily apparent.
When it comes to coding, while it can make for a handy assistant to an
experienced developer, it can't replace an experienced developer. Microsoft's
[47]Super Bowl commercial, which shows a person prompting Copilot to "Write
code for my 3D open world game", is pure fantasy.
molly Write code for my 3D open world game GitHub Copilot Used 1 reference >
Sorry, but writing code for a 3D open world game is a complex task that
requires a lot of time and effort. It's not something that can be done in a
single response. However, I can help you get started by creating a basic
structure for a game using a game development framework like Unity or Unreal
Engine. Here's a simple example of a Unity script in C# that moves a game
object: using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using
UnityEngine; public class PlayerMovement: MonoBehaviour { public float speed =
10.0f; void Update() { float moveHorizontal = Input.GetAxis ("Horizontal");
float moveVertical = Input.GetAxis ("Vertical"); Vector3 movement = new Vector3
(moveHorizontal, 0.0f, moveVertical); transform.position = transform.position +
movement * speed * Time.de } } This script should be attached to the player
object. It takes input from the keyboard and moves the player object
accordingly. The speed variable can be adjusted to control how fast the player
moves.
And in my experience, it sometimes gets in the way more than it helps, as when
I experimented with it while working on a [48]Chrome extension I was writing
recently and ultimately had to turn it off. It constantly suggested plausible
but completely non-functional code, scaffolded the project in an outdated
format, and autogenerated CSS classes that looked like they could be Bootstrap
classes, but weren't. It's good at short functions and common boilerplate, but
it's not going to architect a project for you, and, as with writing, it's not
going to "think" of novel ideas. I like it for getting annoying, repetitive
tasks out of my way; I don't worry it's going to take my job.
Arguably the most widely-described use case for generative AI is writing.
Indeed, as media companies lay off journalists in droves, [49]some [50]outlets
are replacing their work with shoddy, AI-generated approximations. Freelance
writers are reporting challenges in finding work as their former clients decide
that ChatGPT can do a good enough job. But what these companies and clients
fail to recognize is that ChatGPT does not write, it generates text, and anyone
who's spotted obviously LLM-generated content in the wild immediately knows the
difference.
You've gotten this far into my article, so you're recently familiar with a
couple dozen paragraphs of purely human writing. Contrast that with LLMs'
attempts, from prompts with varying degrees of detail, with my very best
efforts put into trying to get it to sound halfway normal:
A table with a range of LLM prompts provided to three models: ChatGPT, Claude,
and Gemini([51]spreadsheet)
Yikes. I particularly like how, when I ask them to try to sound like me, or to
at least sound less like a chatbot, they adopt a sort of "cool teacher"
persona, as if they're sitting backwards on a chair to have a heart-to-heart.
Back when I used to wait tables, the other waitresses and I would joke to each
other about our "waitress voice", which were the personas we all subconsciously
seemed to slip into when talking to customers. They varied somewhat, but they
were all uniformly saccharine, with slightly higher-pitched voices, and with
the general demeanor as though you were talking to someone you didn't think was
very bright. Every LLM's writing "voice" reminds me of that.
Even if the telltale tone is surmountable, LLMs are good at generating text but
not at generating novel ideas. This is, of course, an inherent feature of
technology that's designed to generate plausible mathematical approximations of
what you've asked it for based on its large corpus of training data; it doesn't
think, and so the best you're ever going to get from it is some mashup of other
peoples' thinking.^[52]f
LLM-generated text is good enough for some use cases, which I'll return to in a
moment. But I think most people, myself certainly included, would be mortified
to replace any of our writing with this kind of stuff.^[53]g
Furthermore, LLMs' "hallucination" problem means that everything it does must
be carefully combed over for errors, which can sometimes be hard to spot.
Because of this, while it's handy for proofreading newsletters or helping me
quickly add a fun feature to my website, I wouldn't trust LLMs to do anything
of real import. And the tendency for people to put too much trust into these
tools^[54]h is among their most serious problems: no amount of warning labels
and disclaimers seem to be sufficient to stop people from trying to use them to
provide legal advice or sell AI "therapy" services.
Finally, advertisements that LLMs might someday generate feature-length films
or replace artists seem neither feasible nor desirable. AI-generated images
tend to suffer from a similar bland "tone" as its writing, and their
proliferation only makes me desire real human artwork more. With generated
video, they inevitably trend towards the uncanny, and the technology's inherent
limitations — as a tool that is probabilistically generating "likely" images
rather than ones based on some kind of understanding — seem unlikely to ever
overcome that. And the idea that we all should be striving to "replace artists"
— or any kind of labor — is deeply concerning, and I think incredibly
illustrative of the true desires of these companies: to increase corporate
profits at any cost.
When LLMs are good enough
As I mentioned before, there are some circumstances in which LLMs are good
enough. There are some types of writing where LLMs are already being widely
used: for example, by businesspeople who use them to generate meeting notes,
fluff up their outgoing emails or summarize their incoming ones, or spit out
lengthy, largely identical reports that they're required to write regularly.
You can also spot LLMs in all sorts of places on the internet, where they're
being used to try to boost websites' search engine rankings. That weird, bubbly
GPT voice is well suited to marketing copy and social media posts, too. Any
place on the web that incentivizes high-volume, low effort text is being
inundated by generated text, like e-book stores, online marketplaces, and
practically any review or comment section.
But I find one common thread among the things AI tools are particularly suited
to doing: do we even want to be doing these things? If all you want out of a
meeting is the AI-generated summary, maybe that meeting could've been an email.
If you're using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read
them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre,
auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them? Or
is it just middle-management busywork?
As for the AI [55]enshittification of the internet, we all seem to agree
already that we don't want this, and yet here it is. No one wants to open up
Etsy to look for a thoughtful birthday gift, only to give up after scrolling
through pages of low-quality print-on-demand items or resold Aliexpress items
that have flooded the site.
[Screenshot-2024-04-13-at-5]
[Screenshot-2024-04-13-at-5]
Your AI model is showing
No one wants to Google search a question only to end up on several pages of
keyword-spam vomit before finding an authoritative answer.
But the incentives at play on these platforms, mean that AI junk is inevitable.
In fact, the LLMs may be new, but the behavior is not; just like [56]keyword
stuffing and [57]content farms and the myriad ways people used software to
generate reams upon reams of low-quality text before ChatGPT ever came on the
scene, if the incentive is there, the behavior will follow. If the internet's
enshittification feels worse post-ChatGPT, it's because of the quantity and
speed at which this junk is being produced, not because the junk is new.
Costs and benefits
Throughout all this exploration and experimentation I've felt a lingering
guilt, and a question: is this even worth it? And is it ethical for me to be
using these tools, even just to learn more about them in hopes of later
criticizing them more effectively?
The costs of these AI models are huge, and not just in terms of the billions of
dollars of VC funds they're burning through at incredible speed. These models
are well known to require far more computing power (and thus electricity and
water) than a traditional web search or spellcheck. Although AI company
datacenters are not intentionally wasting electricity in the same way that
bitcoin miners perform millions of useless computations, I'm also not sure that
generating a picture of a person with twelve fingers on each hand or text that
reads as though written by an endlessly smiling children's television star
who's being held hostage is altogether that much more useful than a bitcoin.
There's a huge human cost as well. Artificial intelligence relies heavily upon
"[58]ghost labor": work that appears to be performed by a computer, but is
actually delegated to often terribly underpaid contractors, working in horrible
conditions, with few labor protections and no benefits. There is a huge amount
of work that goes into compiling and labeling data to feed into these models,
and each new model depends on [59]ever-greater amounts of said data — training
data which is well known to be scraped from just about any possible source,
regardless of copyright or consent. And some of these workers suffer serious
psychological harm as a result of exposure to deeply traumatizing material in
the course of sanitizing datasets or training models to perform content
moderation tasks.
Then there's the question of opportunity cost to those who are increasingly
being edged out of jobs by LLMs,^[60]i despite the fact that AI often can't
capably perform the work they were doing. Should I really be using AI tools to
proofread my newsletters when I could otherwise pay a real person to do that
proofreading? Even if I never intended to hire such a person?
Finally, there's the issue of how these tools are being used, and the lack of
effort from their creators to limit their abuse. We're seeing them used to
generate disinformation via increasingly convincing [61]deepfaked images,
audio, or video, and the [62]reckless use of them by previously reputable news
outlets and others who publish unedited AI content is also contributing to
misinformation. Even where AI isn't being directly used, it's degrading trust
so badly that people have to question whether the content they're seeing is
generated, or whether the "person" they're interacting with online might just
be ChatGPT. Generative AI is being used to [63]harass and [64]sexually abuse.
Other AI models are enabling [65]increased surveillance in the workplace and
for "security" purposes — where their well-known biases are worsening
discrimination by police who are wooed by promises of "predictive policing".
The [66]list goes on.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I'm glad that I took the time to experiment with AI tools, both because I
understand them better and because I have found them to be useful in my
day-to-day life. But even as someone who has used them and found them helpful,
it's remarkable to see the gap between what they can do and what their
promoters promise they will someday be able to do. The benefits, though extant,
seem to pale in comparison to the costs.
But the reality is that you can't build a hundred-billion-dollar industry
around a technology that's kind of useful, mostly in mundane ways, and that
boasts perhaps small increases in productivity if and only if the people who
use it fully understand its limitations. And you certainly can't justify the
kind of exploitation, extraction, and environmental cost that the industry has
been mostly getting away with, in part because people have believed their lofty
promises of someday changing the world.
I would love to live in a world where the technology industry widely valued
making incrementally useful tools to improve peoples' lives, and were honest
about what those tools could do, while also carefully weighing the technology's
costs. But that's not the world we live in. Instead, we need to push back
against endless tech manias and overhyped narratives, and oppose the
"innovation at any cost" mindset that has infected the tech sector.
Footnotes
1. When I refer to "AI" in this piece, I'm mostly referring to the much
narrower field of [67]generative artificial intelligence and [68]large
language models (LLMs), which is what people generally mean these days when
they say "AI". [69]↩
2. While much fun has been made of those describing themselves as "prompt
engineers", I have to say I kind of get it. It takes some experience to be
able to open up a ChatGPT window or other LLM interface and actually
provide instructions that will produce useful output. I've heard this
compared to "google-fu" in the early days of Google, when the search engine
was much worse at interpreting natural language queries, and I think that's
rather apt. [70]↩
3. ChatGPT was publicly released in November 2022, right as the cryptocurrency
industry was in peak meltdown. [71]↩
4. Many of which are built with various other kinds of machine learning or
artificial intelligence, if not necessarily generative AI. [72]↩
5. As it happens, he has also [73]written about the "AI isn't useful"
criticism. [74]↩
6. Some AI boosters will argue that most or all original thought is also
merely a mashup of other peoples' thoughts, which I think is a rather
insulting minimization of human ingenuity. [75]↩
7. Nor do I want to, by the way. I performed these tests for the purposes of
illustration, but I neither intend nor want to start using these tools to
replace my writing. I'm here to write, and you're here to read my writing,
and that's how it will remain. See my [76]about page. [77]↩
8. Something that is absolutely encouraged by the tools' creators, who give
them chat-like interfaces, animations suggesting that the tool is "typing"
messages back to you, and a confident writing style that encourages people
to envision the software as another thinking human being. [78]↩
9. Or, more accurately, by managers and executives who believe the marketing
hype out of AI companies that proclaim that their tools can replace
workers, without seeming to understand at all what those workers do. [79]↩
Loved this post? Consider [80]signing up for a pay-what-you-want subscription
or [81]leaving a tip to support Molly White's work, which is entirely funded by
readers like you.
Read more
[82] An image of Donald Trump at a podium, pointing, with a logo behind him
reading “robconf2024”
Issue 63 – RobConf 2024
Coinbase responds to campaign finance violation allegations, Trump panders to
bitcoiners, and I chat with Lyn Alden about sexism in bitcoin.
Aug 7, 2024
[83] The Coinbase logo and the US Marshals seal overlaid on a photo of two
people shaking ha
Coinbase appears to have violated campaign finance laws with a $25 million
super PAC donation
Actively involved in contract negotiations with a federal government agency,
Coinbase was likely prohibited from making its $25 million contribution to the
Fairshake cryptocurrency-focused super PAC in May 2024.
Jul 30, 2024
[84] A person dropping an orange envelope with a white bitcoin symbol into a
ballot box
When did cryptocurrency policy become a voter issue?
I don’t believe that it has.
Jul 29, 2024
[85] Rolls of artificial turf in a shop
Issue 62 – Grassroots
Coinbase’s Stand With Crypto Alliance fudges the numbers, a (former) crypto
industry CEO has a meltdown, and another exchange suffers a nine-figure hack.
Jul 23, 2024
Citation Needed features critical coverage of the cryptocurrency industry and
of issues in the broader technology world.
It is independently published by Molly White, and entirely supported by readers
like you.
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References:
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[4] https://www.citationneeded.news/page/2/
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[6] https://www.citationneeded.news/podcast/
[7] https://followthecrypto.org/
[8] https://www.citationneeded.news/about/
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[10] https://donate.stripe.com/14k8AseTNaqLaZy7ss
[11] https://www.citationneeded.news/privacy/
[13] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#/portal/signin
[14] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
[24] https://www.citationneeded.news/tag/newsletter/
[25] https://www.citationneeded.news/author/molly/
[26] https://www.citationneeded.news/author/molly/
[34] https://www.citationneeded.news/content/media/2024/04/2024-04-16-AI-isnt-useless-voiceover.mp3
[35] https://www.citationneeded.news/podcast/
[36] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-1
[37] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
[38] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-2
[39] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-3
[40] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-4
[41] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment
[42] https://www.mollywhite.net/blogroll
[43] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/
[44] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/22/claude-and-chatgpt-case-study/#not-notable
[45] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-5
[46] https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2022/speech-to-text-with-whisper-how-i-use-it-why/
[47] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaCVSUbYpVc
[48] https://github.com/molly/courtlistener-download
[49] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/sports-illustrated-found-publishing-ai-generated-stories-photos-and-authors
[50] https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/01/17/cnet-ai-articles-journalism-corrections/
[51] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSYCmj-hH51Yz8uc0W55lYYvrCD3464Jb2uULI9_aqsZ6ZGsLl-5IXYv1HkNiNagLFyYgtMubGQx-Ns/pubhtml
[52] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-6
[53] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-7
[54] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-8
[55] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[56] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_stuffing
[57] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_farm
[58] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_work
[59] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-training-data-synthetic-openai-anthropic-9230f8d8
[60] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-9
[61] https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-elections-disinformation-chatgpt-bc283e7426402f0b4baa7df280a4c3fd
[62] https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/ai-tracking-center/
[63] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/technology/ai-4chan-online-harassment.html
[64] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084164/deepfake-porn-scandal-pushing-us-lawmakers/
[65] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/07/artificial-intelligence-surveillance-workers
[66] https://incidentdatabase.ai/
[67] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence
[68] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
[69] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-1
[70] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-2
[71] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-3
[72] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-4
[73] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/22/claude-and-chatgpt-case-study/#llms-are-useful
[74] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-5
[75] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-6
[76] https://www.citationneeded.news/about/
[77] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-7
[78] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-8
[79] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-9
[80] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
[81] https://donate.stripe.com/14k8AseTNaqLaZy7ss
[82] https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-63/
[83] https://www.citationneeded.news/coinbase-campaign-finance-violation/
[84] https://www.citationneeded.news/when-did-cryptocurrency-become-a-voter-issue/
[85] https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-62/
[86] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
[87] https://www.citationneeded.news/page/2/
[88] https://www.citationneeded.news/tag/weekly-recaps/
[89] https://www.citationneeded.news/podcast/
[90] https://followthecrypto.org/
[91] https://www.citationneeded.news/about/
[92] https://www.citationneeded.news/rss/
[93] https://donate.stripe.com/14k8AseTNaqLaZy7ss
[94] https://www.citationneeded.news/privacy/
[95] https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/
[96] https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff
[97] https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki
[98] https://www.youtube.com/@molly0xfff
[99] https://www.tiktok.com/@molly0xfff
[100] https://www.mollywhite.net/

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The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Two of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capitalists make the case for backing
Trump: that their ability to make money is the only value that matters.
By [14]Elizabeth Lopatto, a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human
behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a
reporter at Bloomberg.
Jul 24, 2024, 12:00 PM UTC
Share this story
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See our ethics statement.
3D illustration of a red elephant surrounded by wireframe dollar signs.
In venture capital, you are what you fund. Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
3D illustration of a red elephant surrounded by wireframe dollar signs.
In venture capital, you are what you fund. Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared
their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion: talking about
money on a podcast.
“Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of The Ben & Marc Show. “I know
you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.”
Marc Andreessen and Horowitz insist they voted for Democrats until now. They
are friends with liberals. They claim to be nervous about the social blowback
they will receive for this, especially because of the historically progressive
nature of the tech industry and the Bay Area.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about.”
But given the general movement among their class toward Trump, I think those
claims about being nervous are overblown, if not performative. There is, for
instance, Elon Musk’s [20]pro-Trump super PAC, which has support from Sequoia
Capital’s Shaun Maguire and 8VC’s Joe Lonsdale, among other notables. (The Wall
Street Journal reported Musk is planning to [21]donate $45 million a month,
which Musk has denied.) There’s the [22]$160 million the crypto movement has
put forward in support of crypto-friendly candidates. We can’t forget their VC
pal [23]David Sacks speaking at the Republican National Convention. And last
but not least, there’s Trump’s running mate choice of JD Vance, [24]a former
venture capitalist whose firm’s investors included Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt,
and Andreessen himself.
This isn’t a movement. It’s a clique.
The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen
concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led
them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary”
issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care
about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that
these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and
donate to Trump.
These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say,
mass deportations and [25]Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce. We
are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights
of gay and trans people, and [26]possibly democracy itself — in favor of
crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better. 
For Horowitz, “probably the most emotional topic” is crypto — [27]a16z started
a $4.5 billion crypto fund in 2022, and the pair believe that the Biden
administration has been deeply unfair to crypto. In Horowitz’s view, the Biden
administration “basically subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto
industry.” 
“We’re the largest crypto investors or largest blockchain investors in the
world.”
[28]Certainly much of the crypto industry prefers Trump. But it seems obvious
that there has been a lot of [29]intra-agency squabbling as Congress dithered
on passing any laws. To place the blame squarely on Biden is bizarre,
particularly when we have Trump’s chaotic previous term as guidance. Sure,
Trump is no longer saying Bitcoin is “[30]a scam against the dollar,” as he did
in 2021; he is scheduled to speak at the Bitcoin conference this year. But his
record in office is not exactly pro-crypto. During the Trump administration,
financial regulator FinCEN initially asked the public to provide comments on a
crypto rule change [31]over a 15-day period that included Christmas Eve,
Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day, which effectively shortened
the comment window by four working days. There is also the Ripple Labs
enforcement case, [32]in which the SEC is seeking a $1.95 billion fine; it,
too, dates to the Trump administration. 
The pair’s complaints about Gary Gensler, the current head of the Securities
and Exchange Commission, are striking. They are particularly annoyed that he
won’t pay attention to them. “We’re the largest crypto investors or largest
blockchain investors in the world, and we’ve requested meetings with him at
least a half a dozen times,” Horowitz says. Gensler has not met with them.
Neither, they say, has Senator Elizabeth Warren or Biden himself.
In fact, Andreessen makes it clear that he expects presidential attention,
something he’s been getting since he was 23. Given the number of times
Andreessen and Horowitz make references to various meetings with various
politicians, it’s easy to get the impression that they are mostly insulted that
they are being treated like ordinary constituents.
From crypto, we move to AI, which Andreessen and Horowitz don’t think is being
regulated correctly either. According to Horowitz, AI is as powerful as, or
more powerful than, the internet and the global computer industry from the
1950s on. “This may be the biggest technological boom of all time,” Andreessen
says. 
These regulations have little to do with technology and a lot to do with
old-fashioned lying
Andreessen says in his newsletter-cum-manifesto, “[33]The Little Tech Agenda
,” that he is worried that AI will face similar scrutiny to crypto. The FTC has
[34]issued guidance to the AI industry that indicated it will pursue companies
that exaggerate what their AI can do, say they are using AI when they are not,
and recklessly put products on the market without properly analyzing the risks.
Meanwhile, [35]the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has told lenders that
they must supply a reason for a credit denial that’s better than just “[36]
computer says no” when using AI models. These regulations have little to do
with technology and a lot to do with old-fashioned lying.
In the podcast, Andreessen and Horowitz single out [37]Biden’s executive order
about artificial intelligence. The order requires companies to disclose the
presence of very large models, as well as to provide the government information
about what the plans are for the model, what cybersecurity measures are taken
to protect those models, and the results of red-team testing for sensitive
subjects, among other things. This is in keeping with Horowitz’s assertion
about the seriousness of the technology. 
So what’s the problem? The two focus on computing power. The disclosure
requirements apply to “any model that was trained using a quantity of computing
power greater than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations, or using
primarily biological sequence data and using a quantity of computing power
greater than 10^23 integer or floating-point operations.” Andreessen and
Horowitz think specifying such a limit is ridiculous. Little tech “will be
snuffed out by this kind of regulation,” Horowitz says.
It is perhaps worth noting that nothing above the size specified in the
executive order — the size Andreessen and Horowitz object to — [38]even exists
yet, according to Arati Prabhakar, Biden’s top tech advisor.
The irony is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to point it out
The fundamental complaint here is that these two believe that the Biden
administration’s approach to AI “enshrine[s] the two or three companies that
they believe are the only companies that matter as sort of permanent
monopolies,” Andreessen says. “And they’re going to just basically destroy the
startup ecosystem underneath that.” [39]Andreessen Horowitz is, of course,
invested in that ecosystem, having earmarked $2.25 billion for AI applications
and infrastructure.
The anti-monopoly rhetoric is in keeping with a16z’s latest marketing push.
According to Andreessen’s newsletter, startups are threatened by the
government, which is “now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be.”
Besides his objections to the way the SEC has increased its oversight of
crypto, he is also upset that a stepped-up interest in antitrust has made it
more difficult for him to exit investments. “Regulatory agencies are punitively
blocking startups from being acquired by the same big companies the government
is preferencing in so many other ways,” Andreessen writes. After all, the
Federal Trade Commission [40]has launched an inquiry into Big Tech’s
partnerships and investments with startups — with the goal of seeing if those
partnerships squash competition. 
The irony is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to point it out. Andreessen
says he is upset that Big Tech is too powerful, but he opposes antitrust action
because that blocks a route for VCs to exit. Either you’re comfortable with Big
Tech getting bigger, in which case acquisitions are fine, or you want little
tech to be competitive, which means blocking industry consolidation. Mainly, it
seems that Andreessen believes in cashing out.
In the podcast, Andreessen and Horowitz pointedly name Google as a threat to
startups. “Google, I think we would all agree, is more powerful than probably
95 percent of countries in the world,” Horowitz says at one point. Google,
specifically, is a sore spot with the right wing. Vice presidential nominee
[41]Vance has already said it should be broken up. Vance believes Google is
controlling information and [42]skewing too far left. Of course, Google’s
moderation policies don’t just apply to Google News — they also affect YouTube,
which hosts a great many right-wing podcasts without issue.
Tax reform was “the final straw for me, the thing that tipped me hard.”
It’s unclear how seriously to take Andreessen and Horowitz’s complaints about
Big Tech because the complaints don’t quite square with their behavior. For
instance, Facebook is similarly powerful and influential, especially in AI.
[43]Andreessen sits on its board. A16z is invested in OpenAI, which has a
partnership with Microsoft — and both have lobbied strenuously for more
regulation around AI. It sure seems like if a16z wants to change things at
those big companies, someone could simply pick up the phone.
At this point in the podcast, you could squint and say maybe the concern about
AI and crypto is really about technology and progress. But from those two
topics, we move on to classic rich guy shit of the most tedious kind: [44]tax
reform. Andreessen says it was “the final straw for me. This is the thing that
tipped me hard.” They are upset about a proposal to alter capital gains taxes. 
Capital gains are paid on investment assets, and they are typically paid when
the investment is sold and the gains are, in industry terms, “realized.” The
[45]new Biden treasury proposal means that for people whose wealth is worth
more than $100 million, any unrealized capital gains will be taxed, too. This
is what has Andreessen and Horowitz in a tizzy. It means that if they own a
clutch of highly valued startup shares, they will have to pay taxes on them
before they cash out. This is a “very scary proposal,” Horowitz says.
Startups are illiquid assets, Andreessen points out. “Startups never go up and
down.  They’re never overvalued,” says Horowtiz, dryly. “There’s no bubbles.”
Andreessen notes that the way the value of a startup is calculated for the
purposes of this proposed tax has to do with the latest round’s valuation.
“Presto chango, we’re Argentina!”
Historically, one of the ways that [46]Andreessen Horowitz has approached
startup investing is to inflate a company’s valuation; it is “[47]the OG when
it comes to doling out speculative startup valuations.” The new proposed tax
punishes this kind of behavior — a high valuation means a high tax. “This makes
startups completely implausible,” says Andreessen. “Venture capital just ends.
Firms like ours don’t exist.”
This is followed by [48]an anxiety spiral that is sort of difficult to convey
in text; I suggest you listen for yourself. “California is done,” says
Andreessen. “It’s total destruction.” The taxes won’t just target the wealthy;
they’ll come for everyone. “Once the structure gets established, the
politicians do what they do: they’ll walk the numbers up,” Andreessen says.
“Presto chango, we’re Argentina!” says Horowitz.
Finally, Horowitz gets [49]ahold of himself. “By the way, this one probably
won’t get all the way through the system,” he says. “But it might!”
There is another issue that might cause wreckage throughout Silicon Valley. It
is immigration. An awful lot of immigrants comprise Silicon Valley’s talent
pool — a huge swath of engineers in the US [50]are on H-1B visas. The Trump /
Vance ticket is virulently anti-immigrant.
“The crypto industry is uniquely international, and so immigration law is
crypto law.”
The current CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and IBM are all immigrants. So
are Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are involved in
Fwd.us, a lobbying group dedicated to immigration reform that Musk and Sacks
both left. If there were an issue that would rally the people who care most
about progress, innovation, and talent, you’d think protecting the immigrants
who’ve built lives and careers in tech would be it.
Stopping immigration is a core issue of the Trump campaign. During the
Republican National Convention, delegates held up signs saying “[51]Mass
Deportation Now.” Trump [52]has called the H-1B, the visa many tech workers use
to come to Silicon Valley, “very bad” and “unfair” to US workers. In his
previous term, he targeted H-1B visa applications specifically; in the fiscal
year 2018, almost 25 percent of applications were denied, up from about 13
percent the year before. In fiscal year 2019, 20 percent of H-1B applications
were denied. The denials plummeted after several Trump administration rules
were thrown out by courts; the denial rate in 2022 was just 2 percent.
Immigration plainly matters for crypto — as [53]Ethereum founder Vitalik
Buterin says, “The crypto industry is uniquely international, and so
immigration law is crypto law.” Buterin is one of the most influential voices
in crypto, and Ethereum is the foundation for a swath of Andreessen Horowitz’s
investment portfolio. Among the investments that rely on it are MakerDAO,
VeeFriends, Dapper Labs, and EigenLayer. It is remarkable that the founder of
Ethereum is saying that voting for Trump is against the crypto ethos, and the
big crypto investors are doing it anyway. 
The word “immigration” is only mentioned by Andreessen and Horowitz in the
podcast when they discuss the rally in which someone attempted an
assassination: Trump had turned his head to look at a chart that [54]purported
to show illegal immigration into the US as the bullet whizzed by. I wondered
why such an important issue for tech wasn’t addressed, so I emailed Margit
Wennmachers, a16z’s PR guru, to ask. She didn’t reply.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
After I finished listening to the podcast, a few things kept nagging at me.
Take the very beginning of the podcast. Once upon a time, Andreessen says, you
could get very rich and then give the money away in philanthropy, “and you get
enormous credit for that. And, you know, it absolves you of whatever.”
At some point in the last 10 years, some people suggested that maybe rich
people should pay more taxes instead of giving their money away — that perhaps
the whims of some random rich person are not the best way to support the most
vulnerable in our society. Andreessen and Horowitz suggest that this critique
of philanthropy is simply jealousy. It also unbalanced “the deal.”
“The deal,” as described on the podcast, is vague. To my ear, it sounds like
this: Tech companies could basically do whatever they wanted, as long as people
who worked there paid high taxes and donated enough money to charitable causes.
The money — taxes, donations — made them the good guys. 
The one thing all these hype cycles had in common was VCs talking their books,
as publicly as possible
Andreessen and Horowitz point to the mid-2010s — that is, the era of low
interest rates — as the time of “the deal” unraveling. Notably, this is around
the time that the tech hype cycle became obvious even to people who weren’t
paying attention. This year, it’s scooters! Now it’s [55]viral media companies!
Now it’s metaverse! Now it’s crypto! Now it’s AI! 
These ideas were more or less rejected by the market, except possibly AI. The
one thing all these hype cycles had in common was VCs talking their books, as
publicly as possible. That charge was led by Andreessen Horowitz.
So now, instead of investing in things the market wants, Andreessen and
Horowitz appear to be gambling on legislation instead. Their timing is
remarkable; not even a week after their Trump endorsement, Biden dropped out of
the race, rallying the Democrats behind Vice President Kamala Harris. In the
hours immediately following the announcement, [56]small-money donors raised
$46.7 million for her campaign. By endorsing Trump, Andreessen and Horowitz
have effectively lost whatever leverage they might have had with the Harris
campaign.
But maybe that doesn’t matter. Near the end of the podcast, Horowitz says that
he was shaken by the assassination attempt on Donald Trump because he’s friends
with Ivanka, his daughter, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. “Ivanka and the
kids were just at my house,” Horowitz says, of learning Trump was shot. “We
went to see David Copperfield and all that. So my brain was almost frozen
because I had this feeling about, ‘Oh my god, Grandpa just got shot.’”
“Ivanka and the kids were just at my house.”
[57]As for Andreessen, he has been inveighing against [58]“woke” capital,
engaging in [59]Twitter culture wars, and complaining about [60]what he views
as the media’s hostility to free speech for [61]a while now. In Andreessen’s
2023 “[62]Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” he lists what he terms “patron saints” of
the movement. They include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian futurist who
was [63]also the co-author of The Fascist Manifesto; Nick Land, [64]whose
writing is a foundational text for the so-called alt-right; Neven Sesardic, a
philosopher who [65]argues that race is biologically real and not socially
constructed; and [66]Vilfredo Pareto, who [67]argued that [68]democracy is an
illusion. 
And this talk about democracy brings me to Curtis Yarvin, [69]personal friend
of vice presidential candidate Vance. Yarvin, a software developer, [70]is
openly anti-democracy. (Yarvin’s [71]recent newsletter, in response to Biden
dropping out, enthusiastically advocates for a return to monarchy. Freak shit.)
One of Yarvin’s ideas, called “retire all government employees” or RAGE, is
part of [72]Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation proposal for what Trump should
do if he wins. This rhetoric [73]was echoed by Vance in 2021, who called out
Yarvin by name. 
So this VC cabal is trading against the basic principles of America — not
merely against personal freedom, but democracy itself — in the hopes of profit.
It’s not the first time tech has made the trade against freedom; [74]IBM made
it during the Holocaust.
In venture capital, you are what you fund. Andreessen and Horowitz understand
this, even embody it. But they aren’t just funding the issues they discuss on
their podcast; they are funding Trump and Vance. That means those donations are
anti-abortion, anti-immigration, and possibly even anti-democracy because that
is what the Trump / Vance ticket stands for. These are not subsidiary issues:
these are now what two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures now stand
for, too. Is that a good investment?
Correction July 24: An earlier version of this article misstated the donation
strategy of a crypto super PAC. The group also spends money on Democratic
candidates, not just right-wing ones.
Most Popular
Most Popular
1. [76]
The Elon / Trump interview on X started with an immediate tech disaster
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
2. [77]
Good luck with the PlayStation VR2 PC Adapter — you’ll need it
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
3. [78]
A nightly Waymo robotaxi parking lot honkfest is waking San Francisco
neighbors
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
4. [79]
Signal has been blocked by Venezuela and Russia
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5. [80]
Is the US finally getting ‘all aboard’ with electric trains?
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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[76] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24219121/donald-trump-elon-musk-interview-x-twitter-crashes
[77] https://www.theverge.com/games/24216389/psvr2-pc-adapter-review
[78] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/11/24218134/waymo-parking-lot-livestream-honking-4am-san-francisco
[79] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/9/24217008/signal-blocked-venezuela-russia
[80] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24218547/caltrain-electric-train-us-lags-behind-india-china-eu
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[91] https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/23/24204198/google-wiz-acquisition-called-off-23-billion-cloud-cybersecurity
[92] https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/22/24203960/california-forever-billionaire-city-environmental-impact-study
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The Rot Economy
[20]Ed Zitron Feb 9, 2023 13 min read
At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the
last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is
deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the
markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what
“good” business truly is, focusing on one metric — one truly noxious metric —
over all else: growth.
“Growth” in this case is not necessarily about being “bigger” or “better,” it
is simply “more.” It means that the company is generating more revenue, higher
valuations, gaining more market share, and then finding more ways to generate
these things. Businesses are expected to be - and rewarded for being - eternal
burning engines of capital that create more and more shareholder value while,
hopefully, providing a service to a customer in the process. In the public
markets, that means that[21] companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft were
rewarded for [22]having unfocused, capital-intensive businesses that required
mass layoffs when times got tough, because the market loved the idea that
they’d found a way to save money. They weren’t punished for their poor
planning,[23] their stagnating products, their mismanagement of human capital,
or their general lack of any real innovation because the numbers kept going up.
[24]Subscribe
[25]When I wrote in October that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill his company,
the street responded in kind, savaging Meta’s stock for burning cash building a
metaverse that was never going to exist. Yet once Zuckerberg fired 11,000
people and claimed that 2023 would be the “[26]year of efficiency,” the market
responded with double-digit increases in the price of Meta’s shares, despite
the fact that Facebook’s active user growth declined and they[27] lost $13.7
billion on the same metaverse department that caused the stock to drop the last
time.
The markets[28] seemed to ignore the $410 million fine that Meta received for
GDPR violations, along with the fact that European users will now have to
deliberately opt-in to sharing their data - which is bad, considering only
about[29] 25% of iOS users choose to opt-in to app tracking, and their business
model is intrinsically linked to the repurposing of customer data into ad
targeting telemetry.
Let’s be abundantly clear: Meta’s core advertising models depend heavily on
things that likely become impossible to do legally (or even technically, given
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, Alphabet’s retirement of the third-party
tracking cookie, and the Chromium Project’s planned blocking of non-cookie
fingerprinting technologies) in the next decade. Their other products simply do
not make that much money. Their CEO’s big idea to make more money has lost them
billions of dollars, and likely won’t make them any for quite some time. Yet
Meta remains beloved, because the numbers are going up.
Killing Innovation
Google has a similar yet slightly different story, where their core product -
search - has gone from a place where you find information to an
increasingly-manipulated labyrinth of SEO-optimized garbage shipped straight
from the content factories.[30] As Charlie Warzel put it last year: “Google
Search, what many consider an indispensable tool of modern life, is dead or
dying.”  Users have to effectively find cheat codes - adding things like “
[whatever you’re searching]+Reddit” to get reliable answers. Despite its
decades-long efforts to improve the quality of organic results, Google remains
easily-gamed by anyone who knows how to craft an algorithm-friendly headline.
Without finding a way to negotiate with Google Search, you’re offered a
fragmented buffet of content provided by Google’s algorithm, either based on
how much they’ve been paid to prioritize said content or by how companies have
engineered content to rank higher on search. Google no longer provides the
“best” result or answer to your query - it provides the answer that it believes
is most beneficial or profitable to Google. Google Search provides a “free”
service, but the cost is a source of information corrupted by a profit-seeking
entity looking to manipulate you into giving money to the profit-seeking
entities that pay them.
The net result is a product that completely sucks. “Googling” something is now
an exercise in pain, regularly leading you to generic Search Engine Optimized
content that doesn’t actually answer your question. Google’s push to
hyper-optimization has also led it to serve results based on what it *thinks*
people mean, rather than what they actually said. It’s frustrating, upsetting
and annoying. A problem that likely hits hundreds of millions of people a day,
yet Google doesn’t have to change a thing, because the street likes that they
have found more innovative ways to get blood from a stone. These moves are
unquestionably hurting Google, to the point that Microsoft’s Bing (paired with
OpenAI’s ChatGPT), has gained major[31] headlines for providing the service
that everybody wished Google would.
That’s because Google has, like every major tech company, focused entirely on
what will make revenues increase, even if the cost of doing so is destroying
its entire legacy.[32] Google has announced their own “Bard AI” to compete with
Bing’s ChatGPT integration, and I’ll be honest - I feel a little crazy that
nobody is saying the truth, which is that Google broke the product that made
them famous and is now productizing fixing their own problem as innovation.
That’s because the markets do not prioritize innovation, or sustainable growth,
or stable, profitable enterprises. As a result, companies regularly do not
function with the intent of making “good” businesses - they want businesses
that semiotically align with what investors - private and public - believe to
be “good.”
Despite its ubiquity, companies like Uber should not exist. Uber has not made a
profit from its businesses. They had a net loss of 1.21 billion last quarter,
yet the street fell over itself to praise the company because “[33]gross
bookings grew 19% year-over-year” for their unprofitable businesses that
largely hinge upon the government failing to impose sensible labor laws,[34] a
con that will eventually come to an end, and indeed, has ended in some
territories like the UK, where Uber drivers are now recognized as employees,
and are therefore entitled to pensions, paid vacation time, and a minimum wage.
London, I note, is one of Uber’s most important markets.
Yet as of writing, Uber’s stock is up 5%.
The media itself somewhat fuels this economy of growth-mongering. CNBC reports
earnings like many other media entities, but their[35] reports on, say, Uber
fail to acknowledge the fact that Uber has spent nearly 15 years burning money.
It has never turned a profit. Even with its push into freight and food
delivery, it  may never turn a profit,[36] no matter how much it contorts its
financials to pretend otherwise. Yet acknowledging the truth is that much worse
because Uber will not be killed, because people keep buying the stock, because
it is a “valuable company” in the eyes of markets that have fucking cataracts.
This is why we see such vast oscillations of hiring and firing - because these
companies are never, ever punished for failing to operate their businesses in a
sustainable way, or even with a view for the future, particularly when it comes
to macroeconomic trends that literally everyone else saw coming.
Their business models were predicated on an endless supply of cheap money, even
though the Fed steadily ratcheted interest rates in the years leading up to the
Covid pandemic, only slashing them to mitigate the pain of Covid and (to a
lesser extent) the US-China trade war.. The specter of inflation reared its
ugly head as early as 2020, first driven by the lockdown-induced chaos on
supply chains, and then exacerbated further by the war in Ukraine, the
collateral damage of China’s Zero Covid policy, and a chronic labor shortage in
most industrialized countries.
The markets do not react when they are mass-hiring people to capture consumer
demand. They do not react to the fact that Microsoft, for example,[37] seems to
be[38] laying[39] off[40] people[41] almost every year. In 2020, CEO Satya
Nadella called for a “[42]referendum on capitalism,” telling businesses to
start to grade themselves on the “wider economic benefits they bring to
society, rather than profits.” To be clear,[43] this was four months after
Microsoft laid off 1000 people,[44] one year before they hired 23,000 people,
and a few months after which they laid off 10,000 people to “[45]deliver
results on an ongoing basis, while investing in [their] long-term opportunity.”
Where’s Your Ed At is a free newsletter, but if you like my work and want to
kick me a few dollars, [46]you can do so here. I really appreciate your
support.
Everything Ventured, Nothing Gained
Before these companies reach the public markets, they are fueled by an even
more violently reckless form of funding - venture capital. Venture capitalists
are regularly incentivized to create businesses that look valuable but aren’t
necessarily of value.[47] When I wrote about the Liches of Silicon Valley last
year, I remarked upon how many valley companies experience volatile, erosive
cycles of growth with the goal of being acquired or going public, burning as
much venture capital as it takes to find an outcome:
They repeat a very specific cycle - company is[48] the next big thing,
company is[49] now worth over a billion dollars,[50] company is
experiencing “unheard of growth” (with no question as to whether they are
sustainable or profitable),[51] company is now challenging ‘the big dogs’
of industry,[52] a little M&A,[53] an absolutely insane valuation, and then
a sudden realization that actually,[54] perhaps this wasn’t a good business
at all? I am hammering on TechCrunch links here because I am being lazy -
they are far from the only outlet to assume that a company like Brex would
not simply run itself into the ground through virtue of existing - but the
path is always the same - growth, growth, growth, legitimization, growth,
growth, acquisition, and then an eventual reckoning with real life.
Venture pumps millions or billions of dollars into ideas that might sell a
product or a service, but ultimately resemble things that can be sold to other
companies or put on the public market for a profit higher than what was paid on
a per-share basis. I once suggested that Silicon Valley conflated “making great
ideas work” with “making ideas I like work,” but on consideration, many of
these companies aren’t even things venture capitalists like - they are things
that resemble things that they can sell. Do I genuinely believe that everyone
who invested into the Web3 grift was a strident believer in the brave new
decentralized economy? Hell no. They just went where the winds blew — or where
they seemed to be blowing.
Andreessen Horowitz was the lead participant in arguably the biggest con in
venture capital, pumping billions into Web3 companies that didn’t have any real
product, but[55] stapled together enough buzzwords and websites to resemble
actual entities. A16Z found a way to vastly accelerate the
idea-to-business-to-profit cycle of venture. Despite claiming it was “[56]Time
To Build” in 2020, Andreessen Horowitz realized that there wasn’t ever really
much of a need to build at all - you could create things that semiotically
aligned with what “valuable” looked like and profit off of that. While the
public markets may (at least, before the rise of the SPAC) have required some
sort of business - even if said business wasn’t graded on being a “good” one -
the cryptocurrency markets allowed the vaguest of ideas to get even vaguer
valuations.
This same insipid thought process applies to the rest of their portfolio too.
Adam Neumann,[57] a guy who is most famous for running WeWork into the ground,
got a second at-bat with his new startup “Flow,” a company that Neumann is
still not able to fully describe, but that may involve you renting to own an
apartment that Flow owns somewhere at some point. Just like Silicon Valley
can’t help itself from reinventing the bus, Neuman is seemingly attempting to
reinvent the rental market — a diseased, exploitative industry in its own right
— in his own image. He’s replacing one cancer with another, only even more
aggressive and metastatic.
Neumann was, is, and will always be full of shit. Appropriately, in[58] a video
A16Z released yesterday, Neumann used the following analogy to describe Flow:
The founder turned to a toilet metaphor to explain one aspect of his idea
of ownership. “If you’re in an apartment building, and you’re a renter, and
your toilet gets clogged, you call the super,” he said. In contrast, “if
you’re in your own apartment, and you bought it and you own it and your
toilet gets clogged, you take the plunger.” For Neumann, fixing up your own
apartment means shifting from “being transactional to actually being part
of a community” and “feeling like you own something.”
In a functioning society, Adam Neumann would not be given a single dollar. This
quote proves that he has never unclogged a toilet, because in the event that
you could unclog your toilet in an apartment you rented, you’d probably do it.
If the clog was so severe it required the super, you would probably still call
a plumber if you owned the place, because your nasty business has created a
problem you cannot solve.
What I am suggesting is that Adam Neumann doesn’t know anything about home
ownership, or unclogging toilets, or toilets, or the regular experience of
being a human. Yet he is given unfathomable amounts of capital to address
problems related to these things, because he has the resemblance of the kind of
messianic white guy that is able to take a product and sell it,[59] even if he
is quite literally the guy who failed to do this before.
Neumann turned a (nominally) $47bn company into a $2.9bn company. In a sane and
just world, he wouldn’t see a dollar of funding for the rest of his life.
There are tons of other examples of colossally stupid assholes and stupid ideas
getting money.[60] As I wrote about on Monday, the largest investment rounds of
the last few years have gone to companies that got obscene valuations based on
nothing other than a vague sense of them “looking like a winner.” There is no
reason[61] a weight loss app should need $540 million to operate - that is not
a sustainable enterprise considering[62] the entire weight loss industry is
worth about $3.8 billion. Clubhouse was never worth the billions of dollars
pumped into it,[63] considering the [64]entire radio industry only makes about
$12 billion a year combined. While capital is required to get a company off the
ground, the only way to justify these massive surges of capital is that venture
capitalists are putting companies on life support in the hopes that they can
flog them for a profit.
And this corrosive capital system gets continually rewarded. Companies like
Uber are taken public,[65] making massive windfalls for venture capitalists
without[66] ever having to run a profitable business.[67] Venture capitalists
crammed $41 billion into crypto in the space of 18 months, despite there being
no real use cases for crypto.[68] Metaverse companies raised $120 billion in
2022 for a concept that has yet to really exist, and perhaps never will. Yet
these concepts get vast amounts of money because venture capitalists are
incentivized to pump cash into “good companies to invest in” over “good
companies.”
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
As my friend [69]Kasey put it in a recent conversation, growth is a fire. If
you build a nice, sustainable fire, it’ll keep you warm, cook food and sustain
life. And if the only thing you care about is how big your fire is, then it’ll
set fire to everything around it, and the more you throw into it, the more
it’ll burn. Eventually, you’ll have nothing left, but if you desperately desire
that fire, you will constantly have to find new things to burn at any cost.
And we, societally, have turned our markets and businesses - private and public
- over to arsonists. We have created conditions where we celebrate people for
making “big” companies but not “good” companies.
Venture capital and the public markets don’t actually reward or respect “good”
businesses or “good” CEOs - they reward people that can steer the kind of
growth that raises the value of an asset. Elon Musk’s success with Tesla didn’t
come from the inarguable point that he ended the monopoly of the internal
combustion engine - it came from his[70] canny manipulation of the symbolic
value of a stock through lies and half-truths, meaning that there was always a
perpetual reason that Tesla was a “growth” company and a “good stock to buy.”
[71] Sundar Pichai isn’t paid $280 million a year because he’s a “good CEO.”
 After all, Google has all but destroyed its search product. He’s paid because
he finds ways to increase the overall growth of the company [72](even while
their cloud division still loses money), and thus the stock goes up.
The consequences are that these companies will continue to invest in things
that grow the overall revenue of the company over all else. They will mass-hire
and mass-fire, because there are no consequences when the markets don’t really
care as long as the company itself stays valuable. Venture capitalists
certainly don’t mind - after all, it’s “less burn” to “get you through” tough
climates that were arguably created by the poor hiring decisions of a company
that was never incentivized to hire sustainably or operate profitably.
Until we see a seismic shift in how major investors treat the companies they
invest in, this cycle will continue. I guarantee that we will see each and
every one of the companies doing mass layoffs do mass-hirings in the next few
years, and then do another mass layoff not long after, because they are simply
treating human capital as assets to be manipulated to increase the value of a
stock. They are not structured to evaluate whether the business is
“sustainable,” because their only interest is seeing their current profits grow
by multiples that please Wall Street.
“Good companies” should not have to repeatedly lay people off. They should not
be mass-hiring for fear that the demand they are capturing is temporary, and
those new employees will soon find themselves at the receiving end of a pink
slip.
The lens through which we evaluate businesses is cracked, and until we fix it,
we will continue to experience these punishing cycles of binging and purging on
human capital.
This is the problem at the center of almost everything I’ve written. Why are
bosses mad they can’t bring people back to the office? Because their alignment
of business success isn’t really tied to profit or “success,” but rather the
sense that they are “big” and “successful,” which requires a bustling workplace
and “ideas.”
Why did billions of dollars get pumped into crypto’s countless non-companies?
Because “success” as defined by capital has been reframed to mean “number go
up.” As a notion, it is divorced from any long-term thinking, fiscal probity,
or even what you and I would call “morality.”
Why did these companies never seem to get blamed for hiring and then quickly
firing tens of thousands of people? Because at the heart of the business media
and the markets, workers were necessary casualties of the eternal struggle for
growth. Layoffs are inevitably reported as a large number (“10,000 employees at
Microsoft”), which makes it all too easy to remove the human element. When
confronted with numbers of this scale, it’s easy to ignore the individual human
agony that comes with losing a job. The uncertainty and shame that follows a
firing.
The truth is that nothing lasts forever. Companies can (and should) die — or,
at the very least, understand that there is an inevitable limit to growth, and
eventually they must reconcile with being a stable, albeit plateaued, business.
A product may be profitable for a while, but there is a line at which
profitability comes at the cost of functionality, and your company may simply
not be able to grow more. A business that cannot generate profit is not a good
business, and a business that can never generate a profit deserves to die.
And the net result of all of this is that it kills innovation. If capital is
not invested in providing a good service via a profitable business, it will
never sustain things that are societally useful. Companies are not incentivized
to provide better services or improve lives outside of ways in which they can
drain more blood from consumers. And the street doesn’t care either - just look
at Facebook and Instagram, two products that have grown endlessly profitable
and utterly useless in the process.
If capital wishes to call labor entitled, capital must acknowledge that it is
the most entitled creature in society, craving eternal growth at the cost of
the true value of any given service or entity.
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