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●
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[1]Daring Fireball
By John Gruber
• [2]Archive
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• [3]The Talk Show
• [4]Dithering
• [5]Projects
• [6]Contact
• [7]Colophon
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[10] Material Security
[11]Material Security:
Stop scaling headcount. Scale your workspace.
[12]‘The Brand Age’
Paul Graham:
So when you have a world defined only by brand, it’s going to be a
weird, bad world.
Graham’s thoughtful essay focuses on the mechanical watch industry. But I
disagree with his conclusion. I think the market for mechanical watches has
never been more fun or vibrant than it is today. The action, for me at
least, isn’t with the high-end luxury Swiss brands. It’s with the indies,
from companies like [13]Baltic and [14]Halios.
It’s also interesting to ponder Graham’s essay in the context of other
industries. I think it’s self evident that the entire market for
phones — the most popular and lucrative consumer devices in the world — is
defined by a single brand, and every competitor just copies that one brand
with varying degrees of shamelessness. That’s bad and weird.
★ Monday, 30 March 2026
[15][ ] [16][Search]
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Copyright © 2002–2026 The Daring Fireball Company LLC.
References:
[1] https://daringfireball.net/
[2] https://daringfireball.net/archive/
[3] https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/
[4] https://dithering.fm/
[5] https://daringfireball.net/projects/
[6] https://daringfireball.net/contact/
[7] https://daringfireball.net/colophon/
[8] https://daringfireball.net/feeds/
[9] https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
[10] https://material.security/lp-cloud-office-security?utm_source=third-party&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20260330-daringfireball
[11] https://material.security/lp-cloud-office-security?utm_source=third-party&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20260330-daringfireball
[12] https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html
[13] https://baltic-watches.com/en
[14] https://halioswatches.com/
[17] https://daringfireball.net/preferences/

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[40]Gambling
Why I Got Out Of The Gambling Business
A
By Anonymous
9:01 AM EDT on March 25, 2026
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A hand holding a phone with a tapeworm coming out of itIllustration by Mattie
Lubchansky
[45]
341Comments
There are broadly speaking two types of gamblers: valuable and not valuable.
All are referred to as customers. The latter group are dilettantes. These
people deposit maybe once or twice, usually to take advantage of a first-time
deposit promotion, but rarely or never again after that. Maybe they don't care
much for sports, or are turned off by the way betting on sports makes watching
sports miserable. Or maybe they tried the slots, and the slow drain of money
down to zero left them feeling empty. Whatever the case, they don't have the
itch. These customers are not valuable.
I learned to sort gamblers into these categories during the years I worked for
an online sportsbook. I worked in customer service, at first directly with
customers and later in a more behind-the-scenes role. These jobs required a
little bit of detective work, and I often found myself wading through piles of
extremely detailed personal information about our customers. Names, addresses,
payment history, net losses, geolocation, remarks left during previous customer
service interactions; all of this was there for me to review any time there was
a problem with a customer that needed to be solved. Through this process I got
intimate looks into the lives of strangers. 
What I came to understand while doing these jobs is exactly what kind of
customer is most valuable to an online gambling company. All gamblers fall
somewhere on a spectrum from habitual to compulsive to addicted. Addicts may be
technically valuable customers in that they deposit regularly, but they are not
desirable customers. You don't want your customers killing themselves or losing
all their money. How then could they continue to deposit?
All companies have varying levels of safeguards in place to weed out this type
of customer, but most of these safeguards come into action when it is already
too late. Customers don't set limits on their accounts until after they have
done something bad, if they ever set limits at all. Customer service agents are
trained to recognize signs of addiction when players reach out, but most
customers never actually reach out to customer service, and therefore their
addictions can't be caught this way. Using too many different credit cards in a
row might trigger a temporary lock on your account, but this type of control
can't be too tight, lest it begin to interfere with the not technically
addicted but still habitual depositors. This all raises the question: How do we
separate the addicted from the habitual, ideal customer? 
Maybe this ideal customer deposits 10 percent of his monthly earnings, and
still keeps up with his house and car payments. But he and his family will
suffer from that loss of income. And when an emergency comes, it will hit
harder and reverberate longer. Like tapeworms, these companies prefer a
consistent supply over time, and a dead host is no good at all. But the person
is still parasitized, and is weaker for it. Are these people not addicts?  
The more time you spend thinking about these questions and watching and
interacting with gamblers, the clearer it becomes that the "ideal" customer,
who deposits every day, week, or month, is suffering from a compulsion of some
kind. 
And we haven't even gotten to the darkest part of it all: the bonusing. All the
mobile gambling operators award bonuses in the form of free bets or bonus
money, which requires a certain amount of play-through before it can be
converted to real money and withdrawn. There are a number of psychological
tricks being employed here, all for the purpose of keeping the player feeling
like they are getting to play for free. The ideal amount of bonus per player is
a certain small percentage of their net losses. The calculations used to
determine the right percentage and the methods used to award the bonuses vary
from company to company, but each aims to keep their customers' wagering steady
with the least amount of capital expended.
I never worked on the backend, so I can't say exactly what lizard-brained
reward mechanisms any of these companies' algorithms prey on. But you can be
sure that they are extremely effective, and only get [46]more effective with
time. There are people at every one of these companies whose sole job is to
refine these systems, and they get paid the big bucks.
And now, thanks to the miracle of mobile computing, we can carry these
parasites with us in our pockets. Not only can we, we must! If you want to talk
to your family and friends, use GPS navigation, or "authenticate" yourself for
your job or to visit your doctor, you will need a cellphone. As long as a
cellphone is a requirement for life, there is no complete escape. You will
always have a device on your person which can instantly transport you to a
casino, and it will beckon relentlessly.
In the course of my job, I had to review many customer accounts, and certain
patterns emerged. I examined the type of gambling customers did, the amount and
frequency of their depositing, and the kind of neighborhood they lived in to
get an idea of how underwater they were. I could look closer and see if they
wagered first thing in the morning, or in the middle of the night, and see if
they had a history of setting and removing "responsible gambling" limits from
their accounts. I could see how often payments were declined, and how often the
individual came to customer service to try wheedling a bonus out of a
sympathetic agent. I could see the history of disturbing remarks they had made,
and how many chargebacks had been threatened and carried out. I could see the
remarks they made when closing out their accounts, and what they said when they
begged to have them reopened. With a little googling, I could put together an
even clearer picture of a life outside of the app. Obituaries, social media
accounts, and local news all contain a lot of information about individual
tragedy, pain, crime, and bankruptcy. 
Many of the gamblers I dealt with stick with me, but two especially. The first
was an old friend of mine from high school whom I had not talked to in years. I
saw he had dropped about $10,000 in a few years before making a comment to
customer service that got him mercifully banned from the platform. I could see
from his geolocation pings that his location would move quickly from a gas
station to a parking lot while wagering. He gambled while driving, it seemed.
The second was a young man I had never met, a decade younger than myself. He
had a history of saying genuinely disturbing racist and threatening comments to
customer service agents, and had eventually been banned for it. He had a
distinctive name; a quick Google search led me to a news report of his recent
arrest, and a social media account. The account had a history of sports betting
talk interspersed with racist and sexist comments. But many years before this,
when he would have been in middle school, there was an indication that he had
lost both his parents. A set of public obituaries basically confirmed it. I
could feel in my gut that this man, whom we had happily drained of what little
money he had before kicking him to the curb, had really never stood a chance in
this life.
I've heard all the arguments both for and against legalizing online gambling.
What I think is missing from that conversation is the fact that it's not really
just gambling online that has been legalized. What has been legalized is
extraction, and the new methods of extraction that are possible using the
internet and mobile devices. These companies have identified a group of people
with a monetizable compulsion, and we have legalized the tools needed to
industrially harvest money from them.
Our state governments are happy to comply as long as [47]they get their cut,
and this "windfall" comes without having to tax the billionaires and their
conglomerates who already own most of the country. It all functions like a
privatized tax, where people pay based on how bad they have the "itch," with
most of the revenue going to corporations. With mobile gambling, these
companies have not only been allowed to insert themselves into our sports
leagues and news organizations, but also into our homes. Formerly, gambling
executives had to build great temples to which the willing made pilgrimage, and
from which they were able to leave after taking their beatings. Now these CEOs
are in our living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, and cars. They sit on
your hip wherever you go, with a hand waiting over your wallets and purses. And
we have let them do it.
In a given year, around 15 out of 100,000 deaths in the United States come from
suicide. Among gambling addicts, this rate is multiplied 15 times, [48]
according to studies. DraftKings reports [49]4.8 million users, and FanDuel
[50]reports 4.5 million. Among those millions of customers are a significant
number of customers whose lives are being steadily worsened by gambling, and
among those customers are people at high risk of suicide who might never have
been put in such a precarious position had they never had a portable casino put
in their pocket. Perhaps our gambling tech overlords have factored this in as
the cost of doing business, or perhaps they don't think about it all. I don't
know if any former customers of the company I worked for killed themselves, but
I do remember days when gamblers frustrated over a disputed payout or a bad
beat would threaten suicide, necessitating a quick locking of their account
followed by a call to their local police department for a wellness check. All
the cases I followed up on ended with police reporting an embarrassed and
annoyed but physically unharmed person. Knowing it was inevitable that one of
these cases would eventually have a much darker ending became too much, and so
I quit. 
Though the damage I did while at the company cannot be undone, I can sleep a
little easier now knowing I am no longer a part of that rotten business. I
encourage everyone else working at these companies to do the same as I did, and
quit. The job can be walked away from; the casino, on the other hand, follows
you everywhere.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
If you have experience working in the gambling industry and would like to tell
us about it, email [51]tips@defector.com.
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[27] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vsMt8kzQug6h9qe9B2LObcxUFt0T-ESp/edit
[28] https://defector.com/books-by-defectors
[29] https://defector.com/defector-hall-of-fame
[30] https://defector.com/masthead
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[48] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/mar/13/problem-gamblers-at-15-times-higher-risk-of-suicide-study-finds
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[40]Funbag
The Kindness Of Familiar Faces
[41][dre]
By [42]Drew Magary
12:59 PM EDT on March 10, 2026
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Commuters waiting for a trainJustin Tallis / AFP
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467Comments
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your
mind? [48]Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at [49]SFGATE, and [50]
buy Drew’s books while [51]you’re at it. Today, we're talking brackets,
bartenders, hot people with shitty taste, and more.
Your letters:
Chuck:
I go to a gym on a regular weekday schedule, as do most of the people there
at 5 a.m. One guy, who usually takes a shower right before me, has the best
smelling body wash. Like, the entire shower smells great when he gets out.
I've briefly talked to him before, but how weird is it for me to ask him
what the name of it is?
Can’t you just see what body wash he’s using without having to ask? If you see
this guy at the gym every morning, surely you’ve seen him carrying his magical,
cedarwood-scented bottle of Old Spice 2-in-1 on the way to/from washing up. If
you haven’t, then why not just leap into his shower while he’s lathering up so
that you can get a direct look?
If you’d never seen this guy before in your life, I’d tell you to hold your
tongue. Having a complete stranger be like You know, I’ve been smelling you
isn’t just weird, but also strangely personal. But in Chuck’s case, we’re
talking about another gym regular he’s already had small talk with. That counts
as “knowing” the guy, even if barely. So I think it’s OK to broach the subject.
You can say, “I know this sounds weird, but I have to know what kinda body wash
you’re using. Mine doesn’t smell anywhere near that good, bro!” and have it
work. Don’t ask him while you’re both IN the shower. That would be inopportune.
But in the relative safety of the locker area? Feels safe to me.
I haven’t belonged to a gym since the pandemic, and yet I still remember a lot
of the regulars. Not only from that gym, but from the gym I belonged to before
that. I remember all of the hot members of course, but it goes way past that. I
remember a dude who looked and dressed exactly like a Sopranos extra, even
though we were in suburban Maryland. I remember a dude with big mop of curly
hair who always worked out with his glasses on. I remember this one squat lady
who could deadlift like 225. I never held a conversation with any of these
people. Not sure I even said a single word to them. But I saw them nearly every
day, so they were familiar faces.
It’s always good to have familiar faces passing in and out of your life. You
graduate from school and all of the randos you used to see walking past you in
the quad are replaced with a new set of randos in the office, at your gym, in
your apartment building, and even at the grocery store. Even if you never speak
to these people, you interact with them. You notice them. You hear them. You
bump into them. You see them talking to someone else, and then you wonder about
that other person. They might do likewise, and now there’s a loose tether
connecting you both. It’s nothing you’ll think about for more than six seconds,
but it’s still there.
Now that I work from home and work out at home, my current portfolio of
familiar faces is much lower than it should be. It’s only when I go out on my
bike that I get my RDA of not-quite strangers: the one weirdo who seems to be
running on the trail 24 hours a day, the old man who I know from experience
won’t be able to hear my bike bell as I come from behind, many cute dogs. These
are the people (and dogs) who keep you socialized, even if you never learn
their names. Lose them and you lose one of your tethers to the rest of the
world. Now I wish I belonged to a gym again. I bet I’d be using a
better-smelling body wash right now if I did.
Jeff:
I’m recently 40, and I think I had my first true old man thought! Back in
my day, there was at least some semblance of protest music in pop culture
and music. My old ass doesn’t feel like that exists anymore! Are there
actually pop musicians doing political/protest messages in the algorithm
age?
I made this same old-man lament in this column a few weeks ago … and also
probably 78 other times over the past decade. Anyway, the chief culprit is that
darn [52]capitalism, in the form of consolidation, monopolization, private
equity, and David Zaslav’s taste in movies. But you know about all of that shit
already, so let me pull out ever more and pin this on the existence of the
internet. I’ve been on a tear reading oral histories of old music scenes: the
early days at MTV, the '80s glam scene in Hollywood, the '90s grunge scene in
Seattle. All of these scenes developed before the popular web, and that’s no
coincidence.
Let’s use Kurt Cobain as an example here. The topline I’m about to give you is
WILDLY broad, so I apologize in advance. In the 1980s, Cobain was stuck in
Aberdeen, Wash., with no real prospects and no place where he felt he belonged.
So he packed up and went to Seattle, where he found a bunch of people who were
weird in the same way that he was weird: broke as shit, nowhere to stay, drunk
all the time, frequenting the same seedy music clubs every night because that’s
where they knew everyone else would be. A lot of these people, like Cobain, had
also migrated to Seattle. Some of them formed bands, and then formed different
bands with people from other bands they knew. That loose collection of faces
that were all in the same place, all for an extended period of time, and so a
culture germinated out of it: flannel shirts, Jackass-grade DIY stage antics,
and a form of music that wasn’t metal and wasn’t punk, but instead a ramshackle
melding of the two. By the time the '80s had ended… HEY PRESTO! Here’s the
grunge scene, ready to take over the world with Cobain’s Nirvana as the tip of
the spear.
None of that happens if the internet exists. Instead of fleeing to Seattle in
search of a purpose in life, Kurt Cobain would’ve joined a subreddit that made
living in Aberdeen three percent more bearable, he would have expressed his
jadedness with society on Thought Catalog, and he would have uploaded rough
demos to his SoundCloud as his attempt at making it in the biz. He wouldn’t
have met any of the people who either inspired his music or directly made it
with him. More important, the Seattle scene itself never would have
materialized. The internet disincentivizes people young and old from going out
into the world, from making necessary human connections, and from forging a
collective artistic voice together. That’s why there’s never gonna be another
Cobain. That’s why the most visible protest music in 2026 comes from the likes
of [53]Bruce Springsteen and [54]U2: old rich white dudes who have nothing at
stake.
Kevin:
Do you have methodology for picking your bracket? My family tradition is to
always take Catholic schools. Some people go with mascots or team colors.
What’s the Magary way?
I used to have a whole setup for picking my men’s bracket. I’d pick up the
print edition of USA Today, then sit down and pore over the team capsules like
a homicide detective sifting through evidence. I valued guard play in the
tourney (still do), so if I saw any highly seeded team that had at least two
guards average double figures in scoring, I gave them a little star. Then I’d
sit down with my bracket and begin carefully filling it out … until I fucked up
a line and had to print out an entirely new, clean bracket to fill out. Then
I’d pick a 12-seed to upset a 5-seed, thinking I was the only person alive who
knew that at least one 12-seed always win an opening-round game. Then I’d fold
up the bracket and keep it in my pocket all tourney long, checking off picks
that advanced and X-ing picks that didn’t. Then, by the Elite Eight at the
latest, I’d wad that bracket up and throw it out. I won my pool exactly one
time, back in 1999. This is why Khalid El-Amin remains my favorite college
basketball player in history.
That was my methodology back then. Here’s my methodology today: I get a
reminder to fill out my bracket days before the tourney starts, then I head
over to ESPN’s Bracket Challenge Sponsored By Grok University, then I fill out
my bracket in less than two minutes, basing my choices on a random mix of old
prejudices and gut basketball knowledge, and then I forget who I picked until
they lose in the first round two days later. If the NCAA ever tinkers with the
68-team bracket anymore than they already have, I will accuse them of
destroying my childhood.
Drew (not me):
In the year of our Lord 2026, is the average American more likely to fall
in love with a bartender or a barista?
Bartender. The answer is always bartender. If I’m dealing with a barista, it’s
probably early in the morning and I’m probably cranky. Also, I’m probably
standing in line at an airport. That’s no time to fall in love, not even in a
romcom. Conversely, when do you encounter a bartender? That’s right: when
you’re already drunk and already horny. Real horny, not birthday-party horny.
Then some saucy gal in a knotted dress shirt behind the bar asks you what
you’ll be havin’ and DAMN GIRL HOW BOUT I BE HAVIN’ THOSE DIGITS? I’ve never
slept with a bartender, by the way.
Other Drew failed to include “dispensary gal” in his question, but you better
believe that every dirtbag guy living in the city has dealt with a cool
(stoned) dispensary gal and thought (stoned) to himself, “I’m never buying weed
anywhere else from now on. Elsie is the best of the best.” I’ve also never
slept with a weed dispensary clerk.
HALFTIME!
Bryan:
Imagine you found the perfect girl (or partner) for you in every way.
Beautiful, thoughtful, kind, funny, all the things. However, she is
OBSESSED with the show The Big Bang Theory. Like, would default to watching
it when nothing was on, drop quotes, say "Bazinga" unironically, go to
cons, run a fan website... could you make that relationship work for you?
Bryan, come on now. You have to give me harder questions than this. I have
never watched The Big Bang Theory, but no one is ever gonna be like, “Well I
love Marisa Miller, but her fondness for Chuck Lorre shows is a bridge I simply
can never gap.” Shit, you’re lucky in 2026 America if the person you’re fucking
isn’t a Nazi. So yes, I think I could tolerate a dream girlfriend who likes
that show. My wife has to deal with my football problem, and that’s
exponentially more annoying. She’s also roped me into watching shit like early
Grey’s Anatomy. At no point during any of those episodes was I like, “I have to
leave this woman.” All couples have their differences, it doesn’t matter.
RIP McSteamy while we’re here. He was my favorite character on Grey’s Anatomy
by a mile.
Ricky:
If an NFL team was allowed to have the first 50 picks of the draft but no
other players, do you think they would make the playoffs?
The first year? No. After that, it depends on if they play in the NFC South or
not.
Jon:
Heard that Metallica is getting set to do a residency at The Sphere in
Vegas. I like Metallica but not a huge fan. I’ve never had a strong urge to
see them live, but if a ticket for one of these shows fell into my lap I
would definitely go purely for the spectacle. Is there any band or perform
that you don't hate but would go and see purely for the experience? 
Isn’t that basically how Taylor Swift was able to rake in billions for the Eras
tour? I’ve yet to meet a single parent—they’re all parents—who went to an Eras
show and thought they’d wasted their dough. And all of those people went as
wingmen for actual Swift fans. So while I could give half a shit about Swift’s
musical output, you better believe I would’ve hit that concert if someone had
given me a comp. That woman, like [55]Metallica, knows how to put on a good
show.
Jon didn’t even mention the festival circuit in his question, and one of the
fun things about hitting a festival is falling for acts you wouldn’t have
thought twice about otherwise. And I’ve already attended plenty of concerts
where I only had a casual interest in the performer: Meatloaf, Bad-era Michael
Jackson, Cyndi Lauper. I had a good time in every instance. I check out opening
acts too, just in case I end up being pleasantly surprised (and I have been).
I’ll also go to a show if I have a history with the venue, a la 9:30 in D.C. If
you live near a club-sized venue that you like, it’s always fun to go to a
concert there even if you don’t know the act all that well. I resolved to go to
more concerts a while back, but I haven’t done a good job sticking with the
effort. Don’t be as lazy as me. You won’t never know what you’re missing
otherwise.
Still Jon:
Side question: How tempted are you by these Metallica at The Sphere shows?
James Dolan can get fucked with a broken hockey stick but from what I've
seen concerts at The Sphere look pretty epic.
Oh I’m gonna ask SFGATE to send me to that show on assignment. I love
Metallica, and I think The Sphere is cool, even if the rest of the internet
despises it. I expect a concert planetarium in Las Vegas to be tacky; I’d be
pissed if it wasn’t. So don’t expect my review of that show to be a pan.
Pete:
I was making my daughter pancakes and noticed one of her reading
comprehension tests. She’s in second grade, btw. She hurried through, just
to be done and have time to relax. She picked up one of my worst habits. I
still do this. What habit or trait of yours have your kids inherited,
despite you trying to rectify it?
That one, especially with our 13-year-old son. Like me, the boy rushes through
his homework so that he never has to deal with it again (and also so he can
front like the work was easy for him to do). But I’ve never tried to rectify
that, because DNA is DNA. Also, he’s still doing his homework and getting good
grades. It’d be one thing if he just bailed on ever turning his work in. That’d
be his ass. But he does the work, and then his teacher tells him whether or not
he did a sloppy-ass job with it. Just like my teacher told me back in the day.
AWWWWWW.
Josue:
I was in the produce aisle of the supermarket recently, perusing the
cucumber selection. When I had found the cucumber I wanted, I picked it up,
and proceeded to do that little one-handed end-over-end flip and catch of
the cucumber before putting it in my basket. When I happened to look back
over to my right, I saw another guy pick up a cucumber and do the exact
same thing. Then I realized that this is something that I like to do
whenever I'm holding a vaguely cylindrical item in my hands: vegetables, my
kid’s aluminum baseball bat, even hammers. The more top heavy and
unbalanced the item, the more satisfying it is to successfully pull it off.
Anyways, what's up with that?
I do the cucumber flip too! Vegetables can be really sensuous, don’t you think?
I do all of that playdate shit. I stand a baseball bat on my palm and see how
long I can keep it balanced. I twirl my stick lighter like it’s a six-shooter.
I use a paper towel roll as an air sword. It’s fun, and if being fun is weird,
well then call me Pee-wee Herman.
J:
I have a friend who I haven’t talked to in over two years. I recently
applied for a job with the company he works for (though in a different
department). Do I reach out to him, or does that make it look like I view
our relationship as purely transactional?
Fuck yeah, you reach out to him. It’s a jungle out there, man. You need to use
whatever connections you got to keep your head above water. Your old friend
knows that. Everyone knows that. So if you reach out to him, he’s not gonna be
like, “All this time, J was just using me to get an associate brand manager
position.” He’s gonna help. It doesn’t matter if you haven‘t spoken in two
years. Two years ain’t shit. I have friends I haven’t talked to in 10 years,
and I still wouldn’t think twice about hitting them up for something. And if
they reached out to me, I’d help them. That’s how the white-collar job market
has always worked. It’s also how the white-collar criminal sector has always
worked, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few antitrust laws.
Not Michael:
Do you think you could have performed better than Leonard Lawrence, aka
Private Gomer Pyle, during the Marine boot camp in Full Metal Jacket? I
like to think I would be one of the guys beating him with a soap sock. But
deep down, I have a feeling I probably would have been him in that
scenario.
I would have been both. I got bullied in school, and I bullied other kids.
Stick me in the Marines and I’d be a schlub huffing and puffing his way through
the obstacle course, but then I’d still try to fit in with the platoon by
beating on any other recruit who was as lazy and out of shape as I was.
Frankly, this describes my entire football playing career.
Side note: I spent the bulk of my pregaming days getting drunk/high and then
watching the first 45 minutes of Full Metal Jacket. I’ve only watched the
second half of that film one time, and I remember pretty much nothing of it.
Michael:
If you were the soldier that found Saddam hiding in his hole would you have
used the opportunity to say something really badass in front of all your
other soldier buddies? I feel like it would be a missed opportunity not to.
That’s why we started bombing Iran just now. It wasn’t for any kind of valuable
strategic purpose (in fact, the U.S. [56]has kind of fucked itself by kicking
up this war). It was so that camera hogs like Pete Hegseth could get off [57]
saucy one-liners after blowing up a school. All of these shitheads want to play
the '80s action hero. Hence, you and I get World War III dropped into our laps.
It’s not the best way to run a government.
Back to Michael’s question. Let’s say I’m the guy who finds Saddam Hussein in
his spiderhole during the Iraq War, or I’m the SEAL who puts a bullet in Osama
bin Laden’s dome. Do I throw down a killer line right after I’ve seized my
quarry? No, because I’d be in a state of shock. I reckon that going into combat
is like being in a permanent state of shock. You don’t talk. You don’t even
think. You just move. All of your faculties are put toward the purpose of
survival, and nothing else. I’m not gonna suddenly snap out of my fog in that
moment and be like, “Feelin’ comfy down there, Saddam?” Only a sociopath would
have that ability. Good thing our military is positively littered with such men
at the present moment. We even put one sociopath in charge of them all! Neato!
Email of the week!
Aaron:
My Grandma is from a small town in Colorado and she has this tiger painting
that I love. I've been on a mission to find out who painted it, as it’s
only signed "J.K. 1910". She also has this incredible two-volume book of
micro biographies of nearly everyone buried in her town cemetery. So I read
the biography of every "JK" in the book—unfortunately, none were artists,
mostly just miners who died in snow slides or of black lung—and the tale of
Christmas Tree John was by far my favorite. 
KUIVILA, JOHN "CHRISTMAS TREE" – Died 1939
No Marker - Died Dec 30, 1939 - Age 55 Years "Christmas Tree", who lived at
the Kentucky House, died of miners con at the San Juan Hospital as the year
of 1939 was coming to an end. He was born in Finland and had come to
Silverton about ten years previously from Rico, Colorado. He had also
worked at mines in Telluride and every other town in this section of the
country.
In 1986, Annie Anesi Smith of Silverton recalled that "Christmas Tree"
earned his interesting nickname in a Telluride barroom brawl. It was the
Christmas season and the saloon keeper had thoughtfully provided a
decorated Christmas tree for the enjoyment of his patrons. John was getting
the worst end of a fist fight, and seeing the Christmas tree, picked it up,
decorations and all, and smacked the other fellow with it, knocking him out
cold. Annie also recalled that John was a tough "pure Finn", a real nice
man and used to baby sit for Annie's sister, Mary Anesi Dalpra. Survivors
of "Christmas Tree" were his mother and a sister in Finland. His funeral
was at the Maguire Chapel and burial was at Hillside.
Oh man I’d love to assault someone with a Christmas tree.
Recommended
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[69]Drew Magary
[70]@drewmagary.bsky.social
Columnist. Author of many [71]fine works of literature, including Point B.
Handsomest man in the world.
Read More:
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[50] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/232152/drew-magary/
[51] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087HC32K2/ref=nav_timeline_asin?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
[52] https://jacobin.com/2024/06/tv-streaming-private-equity
[53] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bruce+springsteen+streets+of+minneapolis
[54] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y_aYsZDB2Q&list=PLxA687tYuMWiJ5flW9IWiiBiRsFSXaPCe&index=1
[55] https://defector.com/metallica-is-forever
[56] https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/09/business/oil-iran-strait-navy-economy
[57] https://bsky.app/profile/laurajedeed.bsky.social/post/3mggmp5lhp22h
[58] https://defector.com/category/advice/funbag
[59] https://defector.com/whats-the-riskiest-thing-youve-survived-eating
[60] https://defector.com/whats-the-riskiest-thing-youve-survived-eating#coral_thread
[61] https://defector.com/author/dave-mckenna
[62] https://defector.com/whats-the-riskiest-thing-youve-survived-eating
[63] https://defector.com/products
[64] https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=The%20Kindness%20Of%20Familiar%20Faces%20-%20https%3A%2F%2Fdefector.com%2Fthe-kindness-of-familiar-faces
[65] http://www.reddit.com/submit/?title=The%20Kindness%20Of%20Familiar%20Faces&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdefector.com%2Fthe-kindness-of-familiar-faces
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[67] mailto:?body=https%3A%2F%2Fdefector.com%2Fthe-kindness-of-familiar-faces&subject=The%20Kindness%20Of%20Familiar%20Faces
[68] https://defector.com/author/drew-magary
[69] https://defector.com/author/drew-magary
[70] https://bsky.app/profile/drewmagary.bsky.social
[71] https://www.amazon.com/Drew-Magary/e/B001JS8R52/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1
[72] https://defector.com/tag/brackets
[73] https://defector.com/tag/gym-etiquette
[74] https://defector.com/tag/music
[77] https://defector.com/category/nfl
[78] https://defector.com/florida-picks-a-stupid-fight-over-the-nfls-rooney-rule
[79] https://defector.com/florida-picks-a-stupid-fight-over-the-nfls-rooney-rule#coral_thread
[80] https://defector.com/author/samer-kalaf
[81] https://defector.com/author/samer-kalaf
[82] https://defector.com/florida-picks-a-stupid-fight-over-the-nfls-rooney-rule
[83] https://defector.com/category/soccer
[84] https://defector.com/oops-italy-did-it-again-again
[85] https://defector.com/oops-italy-did-it-again-again#coral_thread
[86] https://defector.com/author/luis-paez-pumar
[87] https://defector.com/author/luis-paez-pumar
[88] https://defector.com/oops-italy-did-it-again-again
[89] https://defector.com/category/advice/minor-dilemmas
[90] https://defector.com/rejoice-tired-parents-defector-will-raise-your-children-now
[91] https://defector.com/rejoice-tired-parents-defector-will-raise-your-children-now#coral_thread
[92] https://defector.com/author/justin-ellis
[93] https://defector.com/author/justin-ellis
[94] https://defector.com/rejoice-tired-parents-defector-will-raise-your-children-now
[95] https://defector.com/category/nba
[96] https://defector.com/a-basketball-team-can-be-sold-but-who-owns-its-history
[97] https://defector.com/a-basketball-team-can-be-sold-but-who-owns-its-history#coral_thread
[98] https://defector.com/author/ray-ratto
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[100] https://defector.com/a-basketball-team-can-be-sold-but-who-owns-its-history
[101] https://defector.com/category/the-machines
[102] https://defector.com/go-ahead-and-use-ai-it-will-only-help-me-dominate-you
[103] https://defector.com/go-ahead-and-use-ai-it-will-only-help-me-dominate-you#coral_thread
[104] https://defector.com/author/hamilton-nolan
[105] https://defector.com/author/hamilton-nolan
[106] https://defector.com/go-ahead-and-use-ai-it-will-only-help-me-dominate-you
[107] https://defector.com/category/mlb
[108] https://defector.com/c-b-bucknor-fucking-up-all-over-the-place
[109] https://defector.com/c-b-bucknor-fucking-up-all-over-the-place#coral_thread
[110] https://defector.com/author/tom-ley
[111] https://defector.com/author/tom-ley
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[122] https://defector.com/other-stuff
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[124] https://defector.com/defector-hall-of-fame
[125] https://defector.com/masthead
[126] https://defector.com/tips
[127] https://defector.com/advertise-with-defector
[128] https://defector.com/other-stuff
[129] https://defector.com/other-stuff
[130] https://defector.com/defector-hall-of-fame
[131] https://defector.com/masthead
[132] https://www.twitch.tv/defectormedia
[133] https://bsky.app/profile/defector.com
[134] https://defector.com/privacy-notice
[135] https://defector.com/terms-of-use
[136] https://joinlede.com/

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[1]
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Sign in
old world
[11]Technology
Feb 5, 2026
The feeling of the old world fading away
“Undone by a string of clues”
Heather McCalden on the struggle to articulate the present.
• [12]
• [13]
• [14]
•
For a long time, I’ve been experiencing something I can only describe as the
feeling of the old world fading away. It’s as if some deeply embedded internal
architecture is slowly dissolving and leaving in its particle wake a sorrow,
for which there is no name. The causes are spoken of: the global conflicts, the
ecological catastrophes, the social injustices—but the actual, visceral,
experience of losing a coherence that held reality together, remains under
examined. To be clear, this sorrow is not about nostalgia or “getting older”,
this is about living in a moment when the question, “Has the world changed or
have I?” is irrelevant because the separation of the self and the world no
longer makes any sense.
∞
I can tell you exactly when it happened, the moment the world cracked away from
me, or rather I from it. I was standing inside a narrow café on Redchurch
Street in London, distractedly scrolling Apple News on my phone when my eyes
caught a headline my mind could not understand “Reality Winner, N.S.A.
Contractor Accused of Leak, Was Undone by Trail of Clues.” Maybe it was the
overcrowding of the room, and the resultant heat which created a sensation of
being squeezed into a corridor, but as I read the words I experienced a
syntactical meltdown. My synapses spasmed. “Reality Winner” as a name, could
not be processed. Instead, I understood that a contestant from America’s Next
Top Model was moonlighting as an N.S.A Contractor. After a nanosecond of
bewilderment, this not only seemed plausible, but felt correct. It was 2017.
The composition of the headline, coming at me on a tiny screen, viewed
sideways, pointed toward a new way of existing: of information from other times
and places splintering the present moment into a mist of shards, fracturing it
open until all possible moments were all time. This time. The time of the
device I held in my hand. 
∞
In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille built what amounted to a city in the wide, empty sand
dunes of Guadalupe, California. The so-called “City of the Pharaoh” was
designed to simulate ancient Egypt for his epic The Ten Commandments. Used in
the film’s Exodus scene, it was considered, at the time, to be the most
extravagant film set in the history of cinema. 
Paul Iribe, a decorative artist and illustrator who precipitated the Art Deco
movement, was tapped for the production design, resulting in an Egypt of sharp
geometrical forms and the occasional sunburst. However, the stylish aesthetics
were secondary to the set’s sheer scale which included gates measuring 110 feet
high, four 35-foot-tall statues of Ramses II, an 800-foot-wide temple, and an
avenue of 21 sphinxes. Each sphinx weighed five tons and was assembled piece by
piece, as heads, paws, and legs arrived on trucks from Los Angeles 165 miles
away.
Aside from these creature components, everything else was fabricated over the
course of six weeks on location by over 1,000 craftspeople. The location, owned
by the Union Sugar Company, was rented to the production for $10 and one
stipulation: no trace of the set could remain. The sand dunes had to be
restored to a pristine condition, as if nothing had ever happened. For the
responsible parties, the cost of dismantling the set was unappealing, so the
idea of abandoning it, intact, and fucking over Union Sugar was floated. To
this, DeMille objected. He assumed other filmmakers would flock to his creation
and use it for their own, potentially successful, projects. Rather than leave
the set exposed, he preferred to detonate it; according to legend, dynamite was
taken to the City of the Pharaoh, leaving it in ruins, eventually washed over
by sand. 
Time passed, and other than the locals who lived near the site, knowledge of
this place evaporated from cultural consciousness. 
∞
We know the old world was definitely not better, more functional, or even more
beautiful than the current one, but it held together. By the “old world” I mean
the 20^th century and slightly beyond but, this is less to do with time and
more to do with what was inside those years that carried us forward.
We know the old world was definitely not better, more functional, or even
more beautiful than the current one, but it held together.
∞
The phrase “undone by a string of clues” implies a betrayal, implies the
technology Reality used ratted her out. The famous printer signature, or the
tracking dots, are all anyone seems to remember, though this was old tech,
invented in the mid-80s by Xerox and then deployed worldwide as a failsafe
against counterfeiting. The real mistake, if it even can be called that, was
pretending the surveillance of certain types of documents didn’t exist, or
didn’t matter. That it could be overwritten, or outrun, which is to say she was
undone by the ethos of the previous decade: move fast and break things. 
∞
The City of Pharaohs was briefly resurrected in a single line from Cecil B.
DeMille’s 1959 autobiography:
“If 1,000 years from now, archeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of
Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that
Egyptian civilization, far from being confined to the valley of Nile, extended
all the way to the Pacific coast of North America.”
∞
Cultural theorist and writer Mark Fisher remarked in a 2014 lecture that,
“Smartphones shouldn’t be thought of as objects which we have, but as portals
into cyberspace, which means that when we carry them around, we're always
inside cyberspace.” By cyberspace, he meant a specifically capitalist
cyberspace, in which the nervous system is radially seduced/assaulted by an
uninterrupted flow of content. The consequence of this condition, of living
online and offline, simultaneously, is not just dysregulation, but a
recalculation of physical space. From Einstein, we know that if space changes,
so does time, the two components interwoven in a single geometric structure
called spacetime. So, as our spatial reality shifts, we find ourselves immersed
in a new temporality, which Fisher touched upon in his essay “The Slow
Cancellation of the Future.”
Fisher writes, “In the last 10 to 15 years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile
telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience
beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing
sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or
it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and
articulate any more.”
∞
Nighttime, late June, the strange lights of Hollywood melting through the
windows of my friend’s white Saturn Ion sedan. It’s 2009 and we are parked on
Ivar Avenue off of Hollywood, talking a mile a minute about music. Nowhere to
be. No one missing us. No money in our pockets. This is how we spend many an
evening, stationary in a vehicle, near the glamour, but always outside of it. I
am just back from London where a single song seemed to play across the entire
city, La Roux’s “In for the Kill.”  I keep trying to describe sound, and I keep
failing, “Imagine the voice of a wood sprite climbing over a jagged electronic
throb—” She cuts me off by shaking her head, and then pulls out her brand-new
iPhone, which is so jet black and sleek, I actually gasp. “Let’s download it,”
she says.
“You can do that? From here?”
She taps a thing, and very slowly, the album begins to materialize on her
phone. It feels like if we can do this, well, what can’t we do?
∞
The feeling of the old world fading away comes from witnessing culture lose
“the ability to grasp and articulate the present,” but it is not, as Fisher
says, because the present no longer exists, it’s just that the present, now, is
so beyond what a human mind can hold.
∞
Over drinks one night in the autumn of 1982, Bruce Cardoza tells his friend
Peter Brosnan about The City of the Pharaoh lingering, theoretically, somewhere
in the sands of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. Brosnan’s life has recently burned
to the ground, a fire having claimed his house, and wiping out all traces of
his professional, creative output. This is why he finds himself crashing at
Cardoza’s, and now, having a strange conversation about a lost replica of a
lost civilization. Eventually, DeMille’s autobiography is pulled off a shelf,
and the sentence about the city is read aloud. This incites a eureka flash for
Brosnan: he decides, then and there, to make a documentary about excavating the
film set. 
The idea, though laser sharp in its hook, appeal, and simplicity, takes an
unexpected thirty years to execute, the production thwarted by almost every
imaginable circumstance including environmental concerns for the western snowy
plover and city politics. A reprieve comes in 2012, when a cash infusion paves
the way for exactly one archeological dig, during which, the plaster head of a
sphinx is gingerly unearthed. Brosnan has described himself as an “obsessive
lunatic,” but aren’t we all at this point?
∞
Sometimes I think there is nothing more difficult than articulating feeling
because nothing is more true and more stupid and more brilliant than a simple
one scraped off the surface of the heart.
∞
It is a cold night in December 2016, and instead of watching shadows spread
across my thoughts I’m streaming four ten-year-olds on bikes, frantically
peddling down a suburban street. On the back of one bike is an elfin-girl with
a shaved head wearing a Crayola blue jacket. She stares down a white van on a
collision course with her party, and with a narrowing glare, sends the van
airborne, flipping it in a somersault above their heads, and for reasons that
are quite difficult to explain, I’m crying like a motherfucker. Something
deeply buried in my brain is sending out a sonar ping; I know this autumnal
color palette, the synthetic textures of the kid’s clothes, the freedom of
getting lost on a bike. All of this looks like my childhood, or actually, it
looks like my fake childhood, the one I used to watch on TV. The show is about
the 80s, but it is also made to feel like it is from the 80s, without quotation
marks, and this very sincerity makes it appear benign. This is pure
entertainment, right? Not cultural commentary, except the pinging in my mind is
growing louder, and my heart is sinking lower, because somehow I understand
that the only way to address what is happening now is through the past. It
contains the thing we are currently missing: the wonder of the future. 
It contains the thing we are currently missing: the wonder of the future. 
∞
In order to relive the anticipation that the future once held for us, we
venture backwards in time, creating cultural artifacts cloaked in the
aesthetics of previous decades. A constant, obsessive regression in the face of
everything Now. The feeling of the world fading away is the same as the
sensation of losing a memory. We can’t quite remember how people once thought
about the future, so we search for it endlessly, and perhaps this is why
history repeats itself.
∞
DeMille’s last motion picture was a VistaVision version of The Ten Commandments
shot partially on location in Egypt three years before he died. At the time of
its release, in 1956, it was the most expensive film ever made. Despite the
fact that it was not a remake of the 1923 film, the set possessed an enhanced
replica of The City of the Pharaoh built just outside Cairo, complete with a
series of alabaster pyramids positioned on stilts to create a more visually
striking horizon. However, the most impressive element of this déjà vu was the
Gates of the City Per-Ramses, standing 107 feet high and 325 feet long, or the
equivalent of a ten-story building and a standard American football field.
At the conclusion of production, the Egyptian government offered to turn the
Gates into a museum. DeMille refused, preferring, again, to obliterate the
set.      
Next Read
[16]britney cover
Dec 19, 2025
Tabloids predicted the future
Jeff Weiss on Britney Spears and her scribes.
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[1]Skip to main content
Stop Sloppypasta
slop·py·pas·ta  n.  Verbatim LLM output copy-pasted at someone, unread,
unrefined, and unrequested. From slop (low-quality AI-generated content) +
copypasta (text copied and pasted, often as a meme, without critical thought).
It is considered rude because it asks the recipient to do work the sender did
not bother to do themselves.
[2]A few examples [3]Why it's rude [4]Guidelines to do better
You just got an unread message notification.
Maybe it's on Slack (or Teams), a text message, or an email. Maybe you were
tagged in Notion or an Office doc.
You open it to find several paragraphs of text - or perhaps a listicle - [5]
with all the hallmarks of AI-generated writing: headings, heavy formatting, and
"it's not X it's Y", with em-dashes sprinkled gratuitously throughout.
The person who sent it probably spent about ten seconds on it. They asked a
chatbot and forwarded its response to you verbatim without validation or
critical review.
But now you're expected to read, vet, and act on this wall of text. When
someone forwards text they themselves have not considered, they are asking you
to do work they chose not to do. The asymmetric effort makes it rude.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
A few examples
❌ Example
#strategy
The team is mid-discussion about whether to expand into the German market.
👤:
I asked Claude about this! Here's what it said:
Expanding into the German market presents both significant opportunities and
notable challenges. Germany is the largest economy in the EU and offers a
robust consumer base. However, businesses should consider the following key
factors:
1. Regulatory Environment
Germany has strict regulations including GDPR compliance, local labour laws...
[6 more sections follow. None mention your company, your product, your budget,
or reference the discussion already underway.]
buries the live discussion · unrequested · generic
The Eager Beaver
A conversation participant wants to contribute to the topic at hand, so they
ask a chatbot and share whatever comes back. The intention is good - they
genuinely want to help - but the wall of generic AI text they contributed
blocks the discussion already underway. Now other participants have to scroll
past it to continue, or stop to read and validate it.
It feels helpful to send. It creates work to receive.
❌ Example
you:
Does anyone know why our email open rates have been dropping? We changed the
subject line format last month.
👤:
ChatGPT says:
Email open rate declines can be attributed to several factors. These include
changes in subject line strategy, sender reputation issues, list hygiene
problems, and deliverability concerns. Here are the most common causes:
1. Subject Line Fatigue
If subject lines have become too similar or predictable, subscribers may stop
engaging…
[Provides 5 more sections of generic email open diagnostics. Does not mention
your subject line change, your audience, or your platform.]
irrelevant to the specific question · generic
The OrAIcle
Someone asks a specific question. Another person puts it into a chatbot and
pastes the response as the answer.
"ChatGPT says" is the enshittified LLM-era equivalent of [6]LMGTFY (Let Me
Google That For You). Shared as a link or a GIF, LMGTFY was easy to ignore, and
clear about what it was (sarcastic commentary). Sloppypasta is neither.
Recipients are left to figure out whether it's AI generated, whether it's
correct, and which part actually answers the question (if it's actually
relevant at all). If you ask a person a question, you're looking for their
perspective and expertise. In this sense, both LMGTFY and sloppypasta are
etiquette failures where sender disregarded the recipient the dignity of the
basic human reply.
❌ Example
👤:
Hey team - I did some research on our competitors this week. Here's a summary:
Competitive Landscape Overview
The market is highly competitive, with several established players and emerging
challengers. Key competitors offer distinct value propositions across pricing
tiers…
[It's a 5-page essay with handwavy assertions and no concrete details. No
dates. No sources. No live pricing.]
presented as personal work · no one knows to check · hallucinated details
possible
The Ghostwriter
The sender shares AI output as their own work, with no indication a chatbot
wrote it. Recipients have no reason to question it, and may act on information
that is out of date, incomplete, or simply wrong.
Using AI as a ghostwriter borrows the sender's credibility. If the content
turns out to be wrong, that credibility is what gets spent.
Why it's rude
As a Recipient As a Sender Feedback loop
Previously, effort to read Writing requires Sender's skipped
was balanced by the effort effort, which effort becomes
to write. Now LLMs make contributes to recipient's added
Effort writing "free" and increase comprehension. LLMs effort, increasing
the effort to read due to increase cognitive debt frustration as
additional verification by reducing struggle. incidence increases.
burden.
LLM propensity for
hallucination and What you share directly
capability to bullshit influences your Eroding trust from
Trust convincingly mean that reputation. Sharing raw LLM sloppypasta is
"trust but verify" is LLM output - especially the modern 'Boy Who
broken. All correspondence unvetted - burns your Cried Wolf.'
must be untrusted by credibility.
default.
Sharing raw AI output is like eating junk food: it's easy and may feel good,
but it's not in your best interest. You'll negatively influence your
relationship with the recipient, and do yourself a disservice by reducing your
own comprehension.
"For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you
encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very
least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an
innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity."
— Alex Martsinovich, [7]It's rude to show AI output to people
Before LLMs, writing took effort. Authors spent time and effort considering and
selecting their words with intention; time and effort that was balanced by that
spent by the audience as they read. This balance is broken with LLMs; the
effort to produce text is effectively free, but the effort required to read the
text hasn't changed. [8]The increasing verbosity of LLMs further increases the
effort asymmetry. In some circumstances (like pasting raw LLM output into a
chat thread), the sloppypasta effectively becomes a filibuster, crowding out
the existing conversation and blocking the viewport.
"Cognitive effort — and even getting painfully stuck — is likely important
for fostering mastery."
— Anthropic, [9]How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
Writing is thinking. The writing process forces the author to work through
their thoughts, building their comprehension and retention. [10]Multiple [11]
studies have found that delegating tasks to LLMs creates cognitive debt.
Shortcutting thinking with LLMs ultimately reduces comprehension of and recall
about the delegated subject.
"A polished AI response feels dismissive even if the content is correct"
— Blake Stockton, [12]AI Writing Etiquette Manifesto
Before LLMs, trust was the default. Authors wrote from their personal expertise
and perspective, and readers could judge an author's understanding of the
subject based on the coherence of their writing. LLMs generate the most
probable next token given an overarching goal to be helpful, which explains
their propensity for hallucination ([13]confabulation) and why many people feel
that [14]LLMs are bullshit generators. Modern LLMs are typically provided tools
to help them look up grounding information that reduces (but does not
eradicate) their likelihood to outright make up facts during their responses.
But that still doesn't solve the trust problem; the reader still has no way to
know what the sender checked and what they didn't. LLM responses, therefore,
cannot be trusted by default and compound the effort asymmetry on the reader by
adding a verification tax.
Beyond accuracy, LLMs write authoritatively with the tone and confidence of an
expert. This adds further uncertainty to the reader's burden; they have no way
to gauge the sender's actual level of expertise with the subject matter. The
result is a further erosion of trust, because the AI's voice removes signal
that recipients previously used to distinguish expertise from
plausible-sounding slop.
"I think it's rude to publish text that you haven't even read yourself. I
won't publish anything that will take someone longer to read than it took
me to write."
— Simon Willison, [15]Personal AI Ethics
Formerly, "Trust but verify" ruled. Readers would trust until that trust was
broken; the author was trustworthy or they weren't. However, shared LLM output
obfuscates the chain of trust. Did the prompter do the appropriate due
diligence to validate the LLM response? If problems or errors are discovered,
who is to blame, the prompter or the AI? Was it an oversight, a missed
verification step, or was verification skipped altogether? The uncertainty
means the recipient doesn't know what they can trust, what has or has not been
verified; they must treat everything as untrusted. Just like the Boy Who Cried
Wolf, once the trust is broken, the uncertainty spreads to all future messages
from the sender.
Assumptions of balanced effort and presumed trust are no longer guaranteed in a
post-LLM world. Sloppypasta creates a compounding negative feedback loop where
the sender forfeits learning and credibility while the recipient burns effort
and loses trust. Receiving raw AI output feels bad due to the cognitive
dissonance of having these assumptions violated.
Read the full essay
Simple guidelines to do better
Read.
Read the output before you share it. If you haven't read it, you don't know
whether it's correct, relevant, or current.
Delegating work to AI creates cognitive debt. Working with the results helps
run damage control for your own understanding.
Verify.
Check the facts before you forward them. Anything you forward carries your
implicit endorsement -- your reputation depends on managing the quality of what
you share.
LLMs are trained to "be helpful", and will produce outdated facts, wrong
figures, and plausible nonsense to provide a response to your requests.
Further, an LLM is inherently out-of-date; their knowledge cutoffs contain at
best information on the state of the world when their training started (months
ago).
Distill.
Cut the response down to what matters. Distilling the generated response to the
useful essence is your job.
LLMs are incentivized to use many words when few would do: API-priced models
have a per-token incentive to train chatty LLMs that use many tokens, and [17]
research shows that longer, highly formatted posts are often preferred as more
engaging.
Disclose.
Share how AI helped.
If you've read, verified, and edited it, send it as yours -- preferably with a
note that you worked with AI assistance. If you're sharing raw output, say so
explicitly. In both cases, it may be useful to share your prompt and how you
worked with the AI to get the final output.
Disclosure restores the trust signals that sloppypasta destroys and tells the
recipient what you checked and what they may be on the hook for.
Share only when requested.
Never share unsolicited AI output into a conversation.
Remember that AI generations create effort asymmetry and be respectful of those
you share with. Sloppypasta delegates the full burden of reading, verifying,
and distilling to a recipient who didn't ask for it and may not realize the
effort required of them.
Share as a link.
Share AI output as a link or attached document rather than dropping the full
text inline.
In messaging environments, a large paste takes over the viewport and crowds out
the existing conversation. A link lets the recipient choose when - and whether
- to engage, rather than having that choice imposed on them.
AI capabilities keep increasing, and using it to draft, brainstorm or
accelerate you will be increasingly useful. However, using AI should not make
your productivity someone else's burden. New tools require new manners.
Use AI to accelerate your work or improve what you send.
Don't use it to replace thinking about what you're sending.
Further reading
• [18]It's Rude to Show AI Output to People
• [19]Personal AI Ethics by Simon Willison
• [20]AI Manifesto
• [21]Using AI Responsibly in Development & Collaboration
• [22]AI Writing Etiquette Manifesto
inspired by [23]nohello.net · [24]dontasktoask.com [25]open source
References:
[1] https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/#main-content
[2] https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/#types
[3] https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/#why
[4] https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/#rules
[5] https://tropes.fyi/directory
[6] https://lmgtfy.app/?q=what+is+lmgtfy
[7] https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/
[8] https://epoch.ai/data-insights/output-length
[9] https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills
[10] https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
[11] https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills
[12] https://www.blakestockton.com/ai-writing-etiquette-manifesto/
[13] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10619792/
[14] https://machine-bullshit.github.io/
[15] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/27/wordcamp-llms/#personal-ai-ethics
[17] https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10076
[18] https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/
[19] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/27/wordcamp-llms/#personal-ai-ethics
[20] https://noellevandijk.com/ai-manifesto/
[21] https://ai-manifesto.dev/
[22] https://www.blakestockton.com/ai-writing-etiquette-manifesto/
[23] https://nohello.net/
[24] https://dontasktoask.com/
[25] https://github.com/ahgraber/stopsloppypasta

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[1]Home [2]About [3]Moonbound [4]Shop From: Robin Sloan
To: main newsletter
Sent: March 2026
Good trains
A Carload of Strawberries from California, 1909, Edward H. Mitchell [5]A
Carload of Strawberries from California, 1909, Edward H. Mitchell
Just back from Japan, my fifth sub­stan­tial trip in ten years. At this point,
we have iden­ti­fied Our Favorite Places, and we simply return to them. This
kind of travel always seemed the­o­ret­ical to me, some­thing people only do in
novels … yet now there’s a fancy ryokan where they remember us, and a homey bar
in the same town where the owner shrieks: “You’re back!!”
It was my favorite Japan trip since my first. We went with friends and
dis­cov­ered that we travel well together, which I think really just means we
are all capable of enjoying things to the same degree.
An under­rated capability, that one.
Everywhere, there was such care, on scales ranging from the radius of a
cock­tail bar to the sprawl of the shinkansen. More than once, the
self-admonishment arose: “Robin, you need to pay atten­tion to this. It’s
remarkable, and it might not last forever. Pay atten­tion!”
I’m Robin Sloan, a fiction writer with wide-ranging interests, which I capture
here in my newsletter. This is an archived edition, originally transmitted in
March 2026. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the
bottom of the page.
As usual, this newsletter has a few dis­tinct parts. Here’s what’s ahead:
• [6]Japan thoughts: trains, books, more trains
• [7]Links and recommendations: com­puter sto­ries, street lettering,
dun­geon synth
[8]Japan thoughts
[9]The trains
I spend a lot of time in the San Joaquin Valley of Cal­i­fornia, where this
country’s first high-speed rail line is coming together, very slowly. Huge
ele­ments of the route have been con­structed but not yet con­nected. These
gleaming new bridges and plat­forms are legit­i­mately beautiful; they loom in
the land­scape like ruins in reverse. I’m a fan of the project, even though
it’s plainly a tragedy — [10]Abundance tells the com­pre­hen­sive story. Actual
track goes down later this year, and all along the route, dirt is being pounded
into place, flat and smooth.
Japan’s first high-speed lines opened in the 1960s, and its archi­tects have
had all the years since to press on: learning, extending, refining. Shinkansen
means “new trunk line”; it’s not so new anymore, yet riding those trains
remains legit­i­mately futuristic, def­i­nitely superfun. And it feels truly
shameful for the U.S. to be so many decades behind.
It’s useful to note that in its ini­tial development, the shinkansen went way
over budget — more than 2X. Yet there was never any ques­tion that it would be
completed. Think of Keynes: “Anything we can actu­ally do, we can afford.”
I don’t intend any false equiv­a­lence here; even granted major hand­i­caps for
U.S. dysfunction, the Cal­i­fornia line is a disaster. Yet there’s a hard,
grinding hope in the example of the shinkansen, which says: just finish it, so
you can really begin.
[11]The books
My Japanophilia is strongest in fic­tion. Here are some favorites:
• [12]Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, trans­lated by Ginny Tapley
Takemori, is strange and hyp­notic — I can’t think of a recent U.S. novel
that’s simul­ta­ne­ously as uncon­ven­tional and captivating. It’s also fun
to read as coun­ter­point to the cult of the kon­bini that has arisen among
visitors. (This includes me: I bow down before the Japanese 7-11.)
• [13]What You Are Looking for Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama,
trans­lated by Alison Watts, is sweet but/and also subtly radical. I
reviewed it [14]for the NYT, and here I’ll just repeat, this book is an
emblem for some qui­etly pow­erful fea­tures of Japanese society. I’d also
like to claim it for the Extended Penumbraverse; there’s no ques­tion the
strange and pow­erful Mrs. Komachi has met Ajax Penumbra.
• I’ve [15]written before about [16]Tokyo These Days, the manga series by
Taiyo Matsumoto, trans­lated by Michael Arias — his pro­found love letter
to all his editors. The story and char­ac­ters are won­derful, but/and so
is the ren­dering of the Japanese land­scape, Tokyo and beyond.
• All of Banana Yoshi­moto’s books are sweet and stylish, a plea­sure to
read: tales of life in the city. Oh and they are short! WE LOVE A SHORT
BOOK. You can choose basi­cally at random, but [17]Kitchen, trans­lated by
Megan Backus, remains her most famous work.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
That’s all Japanese work trans­lated into English. Here are some books
orig­i­nally written in English:
• [18]Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry is prob­ably a top-ten
work of 21st-century nonfic­tion. It’s pro­foundly haunting, and I’m so
impressed by Richard’s refusal to like, “collapse the wave function” of
pos­si­bility around the expe­ri­ences and encoun­ters reported by
sur­vivors of the 2011 earth­quake and tsunami. Here is reporting, in the
true sense: here’s what I saw, what I heard, what people told me.
• On another wave­length entirely, but like­wise captivating, Richard’s [19]
People Who Eat Darkness is a hyp­notic account of a grue­some crime,
offering a view of sev­eral layers of Japanese society that tourists don’t
see or think about.
• [20]How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Flo­ren­tyna Leow is a slim, pre­cise
memoir of living and working in Japan as a non-Japanese person — though one
who speaks fluent Japanese. It’s also simply about young life anywhere:
room­mates and jobs, hopes and disappointments. You could read Flo­ren­tyna
along­side Banana Yoshi­moto and imagine char­ac­ters from both books
meeting on a sidewalk.
• [21]Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod weaves a per­cep­tive view of
Japan’s back­roads together with a quin­tes­sen­tially Amer­ican back­story
to pro­duce an effect that is totally new. One def­i­n­i­tion of
literature, or any art maybe, is that it defines a fresh genre of which it
is the only example; I believe this describes TBOT. (On Craig’s book tour
last year, I was his inter­locutor in San Fran­cisco, and [22]you can
listen to and/or read our con­ver­sa­tion here.)
• [23]Embracing Defeat by John Dower is deep and thrilling. Even a reader
well-acquainted with the 20th-century his­tory of Japan and the U.S. will
dis­cover in this book whole new panoramas of the postwar period: rich
crunchy dynamics, cul­ture rewiring itself in realtime, and not with a
sense of erasure, but rather hyper­gen­er­a­tive reconstruction. This book
chal­lenges dull assump­tions about “victory” and “defeat”, what they mean
on the most basic level; and about “success”, too — of a country, a
society, a cul­ture. (The chapter on postwar publishing, the explo­sion of
pulp magazines, was of course par­tic­u­larly inter­esting to me.)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I love Japanese mys­teries for their wacky, frigid construction — as if these
authors looked at the cold clock­work of the Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries and
said, “Oh, that’s WAY too loose and squishy.”
I’ve written before about [24]The Decagon House Murders, and more recently I
have enjoyed nearly every book in [25]this series from Pushkin Vertigo. (What a
name for an imprint — sounds like a char­acter from a novel.)
I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed [26]The Honjin Murders and [27]The Devil’s Flute
Murders. The latter was trans­lated by [28]Jim Rion, who also trans­lated [29]
Strange Pictures, which has turned into a global bestseller. I haven’t read it
yet, but [30]Robin Rendle says it’s great!
Jim has written about [31]the process of trans­lating a very strange book.
One more: [32]Point Zero by Seicho Matsumoto, trans­lated by Louise Heal Kawai,
is like a Hitch­cock movie crossed with one of those story problems: “Train A
leaves Tokyo trav­eling 200 m.p.h. … ”
[33]More trains
The best trains in Japan are the JR Kyushu trains, and those are the best
thanks to designer [34]Eiji Mitooka. You can [35]browse a gallery here, or [36]
take a look at the col­lec­tion on Eiji Mitooka’s Wikipedia page.
Here’s the luxe Seven Stars:
Trains [37]Trains
The Yufuin no Mori:
Trains! [38]Trains!
And the 36+3! I have been a pas­senger on this one. Every day, you receive a
bento lunch assem­bled from ingre­di­ents pro­duced in towns the train is
passing through:
TRAINS!! [39]TRAINS!!
It’s not just the cutesy trains that are great. Many dif­ferent models of
shinkansen roam the tracks in Japan, and, to my eye, JR Kyushu’s look the best:
TRAIIINS!!! [40]TRAIIINS!!!
And it doesn’t stop at trains! Until recently, JR Kyushu oper­ated a super­fast
ferry from Fukuoka to South Korea, also designed by Eiji Mitooka. Behold THE
QUEEN BEETLE:
Not a train [41]Not a train
(Sadly … [42]it leaked.)
[43]Links and recommendations
A Carload of Navel Oranges from California, 1909, Edward H. Mitchell [44]A
Carload of Navel Oranges from California, 1909, Edward H. Mitchell
[45]Mr. President, please, I need a faster train … 
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The latest edi­tion of [46]my pop-up newsletter is about [47]the limits of AI
automation.
In this short argument, I draw on lessons from sewing and olive harvesting, and
invest all my hopes for a non-robotic future in the great and pow­erful PAPER
JAM.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Here is David Oks on [48]why the ATM did not (as predicted) kill bank teller
jobs … but the iPhone did. What a great post — per­fect use of data and details
to deflate a story that “seems right”.
David writes:
But by talking about why ATMs didn’t dis­place bank tellers but iPhones
did, I want to high­light an impor­tant corollary, which is that the true
force of a tech­nology is felt not with the sub­sti­tu­tion of tasks, but
the inven­tion of new paradigms.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Here’s another post that like­wise “takes the ques­tion seriously”, and in this
case, the ques­tion is an all-timer: [49]why is the sky blue?
In my notes, I wrote:
An ideal flavor of explanation. Serious and open. “Let’s figure this out
together.”
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I loved [50]this rol­licking event at the Com­puter His­tory Museum on the
occa­sion of Apple’s 50th anniversary, 1976-2026. Chris Espinosa’s
recol­lec­tion of [51]a par­tic­ular ser­vice pro­ce­dure for the Apple III
made my day. There’s no escaping phys­ical reality!
The CHM is a treasure; if you live in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area you MUST at
some point make your pilgrimage, just to gaze at the glo­rious hulks. Last
summer, I wrote [52]a quick dis­patch from the Vin­tage Com­puter Festival,
which is maybe a bit over­whelming for your first expe­ri­ence, but always
totally spectacular.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Here is [53]a lovely memoir of a youthful career at Babbage’s, which fellow
old­timers will remember as the pre­em­i­nent soft­ware store. Yes: we used to
GO TO A STORE to pur­chase com­puter programs!
The rise and fall of Babbage’s “rhymes” com­pletely with the
dema­te­ri­al­iza­tion of other media, and in all these cases, at least two
things are true:
1. The new arrangement produces breathtaking new forms of access: it has
become trivial for basically anybody to participate in these markets.
And yet, somehow,
2. the old arrangement was tons more fun!
[54]Read Lee Hutchinson’s recol­lec­tion and tell me you disagree.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I am waiting patiently for the launch of [55]the Slate truck at the end of this
year. I’ve been leasing a Volk­swagen ID.4 since the summer, and the actual
dri­ving expe­ri­ence is won­derful — I just want to rip the screen off the
dash­board and throw it out the window.
Come on, Slate! Give us the screen-free EV of our dreams!
Bonus: Slate’s head­quar­ters is in the town where I grew up 😌
Bonus bonus: Slate’s first fac­tory is an old printing plant 😌😌
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Here is [56]the new type­face from Mass-Driver. Robin Rendle [57]notes the
confidence of this release, and I agree with him: it’s bracing and charismatic.
Also beautiful, of course.
Mass-Driver’s [58]Lórien has become my house font for print productions, and
you’ll be seeing more of it later this year.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
My copy of [59]Pooja Saxena’s [60]India Street Lettering arrived!
India Street Lettering [61]India Street Lettering
It’s fab­u­lous — every spread glows:
India Street Lettering [62]India Street Lettering
Come on!
India Street Lettering [63]India Street Lettering
Pooja’s [64]incandescent compendium is a required pur­chase for anyone
inter­esting in typography, graphic design, and/or urban space. It exists
thanks to Blaft, the pub­lisher respon­sible for one of my all-time favorites,
[65]Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Here is [66]a recent edi­tion of The Ani­ma­tion Obsessive that is, slantwise,
a man­i­festo about effort, skill, and the power of just making some­thing with
whatever’s before you: per­haps just [67]sand and a source of light. Great
stuff.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Here’s [68]the sta­tionery from the Streamliner, a luxe train route that
oper­ated between Chicago and San Fran­cisco circa 1936-1972:
We have retreated from the true pinnacle of coolness [69]We have retreated from
the true pinnacle of coolness
“Enroute”!!
That’s from [70]Stationery Object, a swoon­worthy project by [71]Robert
Stephens.
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Oof … JetPens with a direct hit to the aes­thetic core, [72]this video pro­file
of a Japanese note­book maker … meltdown in 5, 4, 3 … 
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Here’s the back­story of [73]a cer­tain shade of seafoam green you have seen if
you’ve spent any time in indus­trial spaces. I loved this post from Beth
Mathews — it’s beau­ti­fully presented, packed with pictures. I found my way
here [74]thanks to Drew Austin at Kneeling Bus.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Here’s a good post by Drew, a few years old but new to me, arguing that [75]
tech’s indif­fer­ence to fashion is a con­tempt for the commons. That’s via
[76]Spencer Chang.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Spencer, by the way, is on a roll, with recent reports on a sub­stan­tial visit
to China: [77]part 1, [78]part 2. That second dis­patch focuses on the dig­ital
side of the expe­ri­ence:
It all started to make sense when I dis­cov­ered that web­sites in China
are built on a com­pletely dif­ferent, insular sub­strate of
infrastructure. Mini-apps are made of custom forks of HTML, pro­pri­etary
ones for each major company, each with their own rules and syntax.3 From
the out­side (and as a foreigner), you can’t even access most of the apps
because they are gated behind login screens that require Chi­nese phone
numbers.
Living in China means living in an alter­nate Internet.
A weird hybrid between tra­di­tional mobile apps and web­sites, these apps
feel uni­form and imper­sonal, while stream­lining all the core parts of an
everyday app. They load fast, even on old hardware, con­nect
auto­mat­i­cally to your identity, and inte­grate directly with your wallet
for payments.
You might have read ver­sions of “the China report” before, but it’s gen­uinely
dif­ferent and useful to encounter this expe­ri­ence fil­tered through
Spencer’s gaze, his ana­lyt­ical frame: humane and tactile, rather than
com­mer­cial and abstract.
Spencer is one of the great inte­gra­tors of the dig­ital and phys­ical; [79]
his newsletter is absolutely worth following, a guide toward an alter­nate
internet of its own.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Looking at train-adjacent art for this edi­tion, I dis­cov­ered [80]this 1909
photo of John Jacob Astor, and found myself really cap­ti­vated by his
expression:
John Jacob Astor leaning from a train window, 1909 [81]John Jacob Astor leaning
from a train window, 1909
Maybe a stretch, but I detect a trace of [82]angel-of-his­tory energy there … 
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[83]BEHOLD, GALVATRON! A few weeks ago I came across this clip from The
Transformers: The Movie, and remem­bered (or realized) that this scene in
par­tic­ular is a top-five for­ma­tive aes­thetic input of my life.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I’m a fan of the music sub­genre called dun­geon synth, which tends to sound
like the sound­track to a video game you can only dimly remember. [84]Hole
Dweller is great as a starting point. Pos­sibly my #1 favorite is [85]this
album by Rhandir and Disparition, which was in heavy rota­tion while I wrote
[86]Moonbound. That playlist was 25% dun­geon synth, 25% [87]Håkon Kornstad,
and 50% every ver­sion of Seven Nation Army ever recorded.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
A think tank posted a link to [88]this chart … 
USDA Charts of Note [89]USDA Charts of Note
 … [90]calling it “a slow, steady, easy-to-miss kind of progress.”
Yet … you’d have to know a lot more to make that judgment, wouldn’t you? For
example, one might ask, is the food on the right side of the graph as
nutri­tious as the food on the left side? What’s the com­po­si­tion of the
average meal on either side? And what about the wages of the people pro­ducing
and pack­aging the food?
An exercise: plot the trend in health­care costs on the same graph.
My instinct tells me that about half of the change is indeed positive,
attrib­ut­able to plain old productivity, while the other half is malign, and
we’d be better off as a society if that trend­line tracked a little higher.
Food is life’s foundation; it powers our mus­cles and our minds; who said it
ought to be cheap?
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Here is an actu­ally-hilarious offering from SNL: [91]an inter­view with the
most- and least-used emojis.
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Here is [92]Dirt Books! Any­time any­body dares (or bothers) to launch a weird
new imprint in the 21st century, we cheer!
P.S. I liked this recent Dirt piece: [93]The feeling of the old world fading
away
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Here is [94]an inter­view with Astrid Eich­horn, a physi­cist working on
“asymptotic safety”, which might be sum­ma­rized as “the only way out is
through”:
The apparent break­down of par­ticle physics at [the Planck] scale has
inspired some dra­matic theories. Some physi­cists argue that this failure
point in our under­standing tells us that the uni­verse is fun­da­men­tally
com­posed not of par­ticles, but of vibrating strings and membranes. [ … ]
Eich­horn and her col­leagues are pur­suing a dif­ferent pos­si­bility. In
1976, Steven Weinberg, a the­o­rist who would even­tu­ally earn a Nobel
Prize, pointed out that if you zoomed in far enough, you might reach a
place where the rules of physics would stop changing. New realms would stop
appearing; the inten­si­ties of the forces would stabilize; and gravity
would turn out to make per­fect sense after all.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Here is a fab­u­lous matchup: [95]Dwarkesh Patel inter­views Ada Palmer.
Dwarkesh is best-known for his inter­views of AI luminaries, but/and his side
quests into his­tory are reli­ably magnetic. Ada is a cel­e­brated author of
sci­ence fic­tion who is also a his­to­rian of the Renaissance.
The seg­ment [96]discussing Guten­berg and the very early days of the printing
press is par­tic­u­larly compelling. I have read a lot — really a lot! —  about
this period, yet I found new fram­ings here; I love Ada’s focus on
dis­tri­b­u­tion networks. This is just extremely fun and inter­esting all
around.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
One of the pri­vate con­trac­tors building Cal­i­fornia’s high-speed rail line
graces us with the most William Gibson-ass name you’ve ever heard: [97]Dragados
Flatiron 😎
A Carload of Potato from California, 1909, Edward H. Mitchell [98]A Carload of
Potato from California, 1909, Edward H. Mitchell
Here’s [99]a reminder, from Alan Jacobs, of the power of a phrase and an image
from Robert Mac­far­lane:
A decade ago Robert Mac­far­lane pub­lished a won­derful book called
Land­marks [ … ] which argues for the preser­va­tion and exten­sion of the
accu­rate descrip­tion of our nat­ural environments. The book col­lects,
from a range of British places, local words for local things, and
Mac­far­lane calls that col­lec­tion his Counter-Desecration Phrasebook. It
occurs to me that we need many Counter-Desecration Phrase­books to help us
pro­tect and pre­serve what Gan­dalf calls “all worthy things that are in
peril as the world now stands.”
Mac­far­lane’s focus is on the pre­ci­sion of local language, yet in Alan’s
endorse­ment I detect the pos­si­bility of broader application. For my part, I
think any and every little per­sonal newsletter or blog, if it’s con­structed
with sin­cerity and care, acts as a tiny CDP. Or per­haps it pro­vides one page
in the larger CDP: still meager com­pared to all the books of ruin on all the
shelves of the world … and so what?
CAR­LOAD OF POTATO!
From Oakland,
Robin
P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in mid-April, con­taining the
announce­ment of a new project and a new product.
March 2026
I’m [100]Robin Sloan, a writer, printer, & manufacturer. The best thing to do
here is sign up for my email newsletter:
[101][ ] [102][Subscribe]
This web­site doesn’t col­lect any infor­ma­tion about you or your reading.
It aspires to the speed and pri­vacy of the printed page.
Don’t miss [103]the colophon. Hony soyt qui mal pence
References:
[1] https://www.robinsloan.com/
[2] https://www.robinsloan.com/about/
[3] https://www.robinsloan.com/moonbound/
[4] https://www.robinsloan.com/shop/
[5] https://pdimagearchive.org/images/66f6eaa7-2369-47bf-a2d3-321e06af8514/
[6] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/good-trains/#rooms
[7] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/good-trains/#links
[8] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/good-trains/#japan
[9] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/good-trains/#japan-trains
[10] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9781668023488?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[11] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/good-trains/#japan-books
[12] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9780802129628?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[13] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9781335147158?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/books/what-you-are-looking-for-is-in-the-library-michiko-aoyama.html?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[15] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/double-pulse/#books
[16] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9781974738809?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[17] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9780802142443?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[18] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9781250192813?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[19] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9781250390585?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[20] https://theemmapress.com/shop/prose/essays/how-kyoto-breaks-your-heart/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[21] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9780593732540?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[22] https://craigmod.com/books/things_become_other_things/tourpod/04-booksmith-robin_sloan/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[23] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9780393320275?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[24] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/decagon-house-murders/
[25] https://pushkinpress.com/collection/japanese-crime/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[26] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9781782275008?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[27] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9781782278849?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[28] https://jimrion.com/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[29] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9780063433083?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[30] https://robinrendle.com/notes/strange-pictures/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[31] https://jimrion.com/2025/01/23/translating-strange-pictures/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[32] https://bookshop.org/a/541/9781913394936?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[33] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/good-trains/#japan-more-trains
[34] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiji_Mitooka?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[35] https://www.jrkyushu.co.jp/english/train/index.html?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[36] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiji_Mitooka?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[37] https://www.jrkyushu.co.jp/english/train/index.html?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[38] https://www.jrkyushu.co.jp/english/train/index.html?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[39] https://www.jrkyushu.co.jp/english/train/index.html?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[40] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishi_Kyushu_Shinkansen?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[41] https://www.jrkyushu.co.jp/english/train/index.html?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[42] https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15563130?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[43] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/good-trains/#links
[44] https://pdimagearchive.org/images/ba5855cc-22d7-48ce-bcdd-0220700bf5d8/
[45] https://cottonmodules.bandcamp.com/track/magnet-train?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[46] https://www.robinsloan.com/winter-garden/
[47] https://www.robinsloan.com/winter-garden/magic-circle/
[48] https://davidoks.blog/p/why-the-atm-didnt-kill-bank-teller?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[49] https://explainers.blog/posts/why-is-the-sky-blue/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[50] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCSNJgI2LFI
[51] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCSNJgI2LFI#t=32m30s
[52] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/inevitable-technologies/
[53] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/how-i-launched-3-consoles-and-found-true-love-at-babbages-store-no-9/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[54] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/how-i-launched-3-consoles-and-found-true-love-at-babbages-store-no-9/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[55] https://www.slate.auto/en?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[56] https://mass-driver.com/typefaces/md-ui/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[57] https://robinrendle.com/notes/reading-without-reading/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[58] https://mass-driver.com/typefaces/md-lorien/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[59] https://www.instagram.com/matratype/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[60] https://www.blaft.com/products/india-street-lettering?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[61] https://www.blaft.com/products/india-street-lettering?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[62] https://www.blaft.com/products/india-street-lettering?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[63] https://www.blaft.com/products/india-street-lettering?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[64] https://www.blaft.com/products/india-street-lettering?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[65] https://www.blaft.com/collections/new-arrivals/products/ghosts-monsters-and-demons-of-india?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[66] https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/sand-and-a-source-of-light?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[67] https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/sand-and-a-source-of-light?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[68] https://stationeryobject.com/posts/streamliner-city-of-san-francisco-train/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[69] https://stationeryobject.com/posts/streamliner-city-of-san-francisco-train/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[70] https://stationeryobject.com/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[71] https://www.robertstephens.com/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[72] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_UvVavl-eE
[73] https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms-were-seafoam?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[74] https://kneelingbus.substack.com/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[75] https://reallifemag.com/worn-out/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[76] https://spencer.place/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[77] https://news.spencer.place/p/chinese-period-of-my-life-a-visit?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[78] https://news.spencer.place/p/the-chinese-internet?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[79] https://news.spencer.place/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[80] https://pdimagearchive.org/images/c5961d1a-89c0-4506-89a2-8c458935710b/
[81] https://pdimagearchive.org/images/c5961d1a-89c0-4506-89a2-8c458935710b/
[82] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[83] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzUU-aiDm-c
[84] https://holedweller.bandcamp.com/track/an-empty-tankard-of-ale-at-the-floating-log-inn?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[85] https://disparition.bandcamp.com/album/troika-ep?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[86] https://www.robinsloan.com/moonbound/
[87] https://hakonkornstad.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-sarajevo?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[88] https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=100002&utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[89] https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=100002&utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[90] https://x.com/HumanProgress/status/2028636514414915783?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[91] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59CpJqCbxXs
[92] https://books.dirt.fyi/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[93] https://dirt.fyi/article/2026/02/the-feeling-of-the-old-world-fading-away?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[94] https://www.quantamagazine.org/where-some-see-strings-she-sees-a-space-time-made-of-fractals-20260311/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[95] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAIhVfGbREA
[96] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAIhVfGbREA#t=58m12s
[97] https://www.dfcp23.com/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[98] https://pdimagearchive.org/images/ba5855cc-22d7-48ce-bcdd-0220700bf5d8/
[99] https://social.ayjay.org/2026/02/25/a-decade-ago-robert-macfarlane.html?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[100] https://www.robinsloan.com/about?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
[103] https://www.robinsloan.com/colophon/