Amod Lele makes a strong argument for disengaged Buddhism:

The Cakkavatti, it seems to me, is tremendously inspiring in times like these. It reminds us to avoid the kind of hope I had dashed in the late 2010s, that a better world was around the corner. It warns us that things will get worse before they get better – and that the getting better may well not be in our lifetimes. Yet it also reminds us that material well-being is not necessary for moral improvement. The pessimistic slogan that comes out of it is “things will get worse before they get better”. The optimistic slogan, though, is “things will get worse but I can be better”.

If you step back and take a longer view of history, things get worse and better then worse and really bad and a bit better. There’s not much point in getting worked up over the big things.

But, there are a lot of little things on a personal level, at the family level, in an office, in a neighbourhood that you can do. It seems like the more someone is worked up about the big things, the less they even see the possibilities on the small scale.

You can have values and positions without watching the news constantly. Low effort social media posts aren’t going to solve anything and are reminiscent of Bonhoeffer’s cheap grace.

When I talk about values, I means how cruelty and vindictiveness have become default emotional states. And it’s not just the obvious side engaging in this—there’s positive glee from many Democrats I know at the pain of people who have engaged in wrongthink.

Andy Rotman has a fascinating book about hungry ghosts, in which he explores how Buddhist ethics have dealt with meanness, being nasty, or in his own words, “being an asshole”. I recommend this talk about it.

John Gruber and others have finally moved back to critical thinking after years of being fanboys repeating Apple Marketing. Hence: Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino. In short, the early “Apple Intelligence” claims simply don’t add up, they aren’t being released, and one can only wonder if they ever will be.

Going beyond “Apple Intelligence”, Apple’s other major “innovation” of late has been those silly goggles that everyone promptly forgot about. Then there’s the car that never got out the door.

I think there’s a clear and obvious reason why companies aren’t particularly innovative anymore, to quote Robert Reich:

Apple now spends twice as much on stock buybacks as on R&D. Over the last fiscal year, Apple doled out $78 billion on buybacks.

Even Apple has turned to the trinity of American business: hype, dark patterns, and buybacks to make money on paper. And thus it’s not surprising to see what’s happened to the company.

Of course, massive companies don’t implode at the same speed across the organization. The m-series MacBooks are fantastic. That same article gives a plausible reason for why Intel fell so far behind and is not longer producing chips for Apple:

Intel, the largest chip maker in America, with revenues last year of $54 billion, was recently awarded an $8.5 billion grant from the federal CHIPS and Science Act, plus $11 billion in subsidized loans.

But Intel fritters away its profits on stock buybacks. Its website proudly touts that it has spent $152 billion on stock buybacks since 1990.

The private equity mindset has infected most big companies in the US, stifling innovation. Instead, they’re riding on the coattails of previous generations while playing games in spreadsheets to create artificial value. Sooner or later, the chickens are going to come home to roost.

I remember back during the whole kneeling during the national anthem thing that the right-wing word de jure was ungrateful. Only half paying attention to American politics, I thought it was weird but never really put it together.

Doing a simple internet search, I found a nice explainer: If You Can’t Say Unqualified, Say Ungrateful. It’s not long and a few quotes won’t do it justice anyway. The thrust of it is that if someone outside of the in-power group is successful, that success has to be at the behest and benevolence of the in-power group—according to the logic of the in-power group, of course. And thus a successful outsider to the in-power group must live in constant acknowledgement of a sort of debt and fealty to the in-power group. To do otherwise is to be ungrateful, or to remove the dog whistle: a threat to the current power hierarchy because that person is living proof of its wrongness.

I specifically avoided using “white” and “black” in my summary, because I think this dynamic applies beyond racism in America. I think this explains that current obsession with “saying thanks” and claiming someone is ungrateful even after one has, in fact, said thanks. It’s not about the literal word thanks or even actual gratitude. It’s about acknowledging the asymmetrical power dynamic and acquiescing to your own servitude.

I’m not a fan of banned word lists and canceling someone that tweeted the word ungrateful 20 years ago. That’s a distraction. What’s relevant now is be on the lookout for these sorts of dog whistles and try to dig into what they really mean. More importantly, don’t use them yourself and if you hear one, follow up—well, what do you mean by ungrateful, could you give some specific examples? Just don’t expect a coherent response.

I’m back. Well kind of, but more on that later.

Let’s start out with Drew Gooden’s typically lighthearted but poignant take that technology isn’t fun anymore. He’s right that the magical feeling of building and tinkering has been replaced with ubiquitous tentacles of monetization and frustration creeping into every aspect of our lives.

And so taking a sabbatical from writing meant more time to stare at the void of my screen, and it’s not pretty out there. I can’t just pretend nothing’s happening in the world and that “I’m not into partisan politics”. And yet I can’t let shouting about the Current Thing become my entire identity.

Even though the fun and carefree sense of exploration has been sapped out of the blogging world of the early 2000s that I started writing in, there’s still a point to all this. Writing is how I navigate that tension between engaging with the world that is, frankly, terrifying, while hovering just a bit aloof from it all.

But yeah, I’m back. I have a million design ideas and want experiment with some self-contained writing projects (hat tip to idea). Because, at least for me, when I’m not actively building something online, I’m sitting and staring at the void. Enough of that.

The advantage of working with a UX professional is that he or she will challenge ideas and work through the tradeoffs of complex problems to find a solution. In most cases the UX designer’s solution won’t be the simplistic “just put another button there” that management asked for. That’s the job, though. You unpack iffy suggested solutions to find the real problem, and then you work from that to flesh out a better solution.

The issue with using an LLM is that it will do precisely what it’s told. It will give managers the button and text they want, but it will never tell them that an email to select customers would be a better way to communicate that information.

I’ve put together my own amateur anthropologist’s take on this. Almost every person I know who’s “excited about AI” is a man. And a certain type at that. And for them, there’s something thrilling about having an entity that can’t say no to you, that can’t reject you. That’s why I don’t think the concern about chatbot “girlfriends” is aimless moral panic. This technology is reinforcing the fantasy of those already in power: they should never be told no to and need their every whim indulged.

As an aside and following the lead of Jaron Lanier, I refuse to say AI. It’s just a bunch of computation mashing up text. There’s no intelligence, no non-human thinking going on behind the scenes.

That’s why I’ve come to both crave and value human craft and thought. There’s so much joy in reading a beautiful novel that a person has put his heart and soul into drafting. Using well-designed software is a pleasure. And yet more and more of the digital world is becoming some sort of LLM dump, to borrow from the idea that the internet is an SEO landfill. Within a few years, I suspect that the internet will become mostly useless for finding anything other than the Current Thing and LLM generated content.

No thanks. I’m enjoying spending a lot less time online these days.

A point that Neil Postman makes in Amusing Ourselves to Death is that our modern entertainment-based media can’t have a serious discussion when you have to cut to an irrelevant, peppy commercial in the next ten seconds.

Here’s an even more extreme example from a leading Ukrainian newspaper’s website:

The headline is talking about the US embassy in Kyiv and a nuclear threat right next to an ad for an automatic cat feeder. I guess the cat’s not going to feed itself after a nuclear blast, but really?

Besides the completely absurd mismatch of the ad and the headline, there are two other points about entertainment as news culture in this screenshot.

Why do we need a meaningless stock photo of an enormous American flag? It adds nothing to the story. To see how news could be, take a look at the text-only NPR site. It’s no frills, but there’s a gravitas there that stock photos and automatic cat feeders can’t impart.

The reason I haven’t translated the headline itself yet is that it’s a convoluted mess. It reads, “USA explains, why the embassy in Kyiv was closed: not because of the threat of a nuclear strike.” The last of the three lines in the screenshot reads “threat of a nuclear strike”; it’s only buried in the middle of the second line that you get the negation of this. I don’t think this is just bad editing. It’s intentionally dramatic.

A much more informative and less alarmist headline would have been, “US Embassy in Kyiv denies closure is due to nuclear strike rumors”. This has the added benefit of being shorter in both languages.

This isn’t a one off thing. Making everything into dramatic entertainment is so ubiquitous that’s hard to imagine a media environment without it.

One of the key antidote’s to the ills of the modern web that Jaron Lanier proposes is a return to individuals. He’s not talking about radical individualism; he means the writing and thought of an individual, with all of his or her personality and idiosyncrasies on full display. This contrasts with the nameless mashups who repackage generic “content” and memes.

Something nice about reading the thoughts of individuals is that you can easily find people with radically different experiences and views. Freya India is a young woman who writes about ubiquitous technology confronting girls and young women.

The introduction to her latest piece has some bits that resonated with me:

I find myself hard to place politically. I feel alienated by the progressive left. I feel disheartened by the commodification of everything. I have a conservative temperament, and think there is much from the past worth holding onto. But when I look at many conservatives today, all they seem to care about conserving is their own fame and follower counts. They care more about the culture war than their own character. Many fight for Western civilisation but few fight for their own civility. Plenty wish the world wasn’t so prideful or self-obsessed, but seem blind to their own vanity. A lot of talk about faith, little living it.

Yes, yes, and yes.

The MAGA movement is vulgar and base. I will never support it nor vote for its proponents. And tet I feel decreasing affinity towards the progressive left, and even the most pragmatic of centrists have lost their allure for me.

In the tech world, especially among the chronically online, perhaps the most shocking thing is to come out as apolitical. Among Western Buddhists, it’s unheard of to be a disengaged Buddhist.

I’m all for democracy, but I’ve come to stop believing it scales well. The more energy I invest in American and Ukrainian politics, the less I’m involved in my local community in Amsterdam. Although even that’s too big. How about being a good person and sharing my values through spending time with family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers?

I’ll quote Amod Lele again, who wrote the above academic article about disengaged Buddhism. He has a persuasive blog post critiquing the idea that’s come into vogue in progressive circles that you have to be vocally anti-X or you for whatever horrendous thing X is. Yes, you can be not racist is best read in full, but I’ll give a couple of meaningful excerpts:

Therefore, by Kendi’s logic, he and I are “allowing” the war in Sudan to “persevere” – and we are therefore supporters of that war. We are not confronting the persecution of Rohingya refugees in Burma; therefore, we are allowing it to persevere, and we are therefore supporters of that persecution. We are not part of any of these solutions – and therefore, by Kendi’s “no safe space” logic, we are part of all of these problems. One must be a part of the solution to any and all problems in the world, including climate change, gun violence, famine, emerging diseases, biodiversity loss, nuclear proliferation, desertification, AIDS, cyberbullying, sexual harassment, human trafficking, terrorism, inflation, water scarcity, peak oil, cancer, heart disease, traffic accidents, the teen mental health crisis, soil erosion, acid rain, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – or else one is a part of each of them. For one who does not confront them allows them to persevere, and by that inaction supports them.

And the conclusion:

Because of course we can’t actually be working to solve every possible problem the world has. There are people who try to do so: they’re called burnouts. If one is to be an effective activist for the causes one cares about most, one must be active in one’s support of those specific causes. One must focus, one must pick one’s battles. An anti-racist activist can be against climate change and nuclear proliferation and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but if she tries to confront all of those different issues, she will weaken her own anti-racist activism.

I don’t think this goes far enough. The trendy term “compassion fatigue” is a real thing, I suppose. But there’s an underlying assumption that I disagree with. We don’t, nor can we have perfect knowledge about that long laundry list of all the world’s ills. Most of those issues flat out don’t have a single right answer, and the oversimplification of every global problem to a solution that neatly fits into an Instagram story is, in fact, part of the very problem.

I like the general ideas on the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, and Jason Slaughter, the owner of channel, has probably done more than anyone else to popularize the ideas behind Dutch transportation engineering.

His latest video on autonomous vehicles is the summary of years of work and one of the best attacks on the tech-utopian ideas underlying the autonous vehicle movement.

The video is long, but it’s really worth watching whole thing. Enjoy!

I’m fascinated by the idea that whales are an advanced civilization right in front of us that we have haven’t given much thought to communicating with. Our idea of aliens has been shaped by Star Trek, and we think that we’ll happen upon some green creatures that conveniently speak fluent English.

There’s increasing hope that we’ll be able to understand whale speech, and this short podcast with one of the professors leading the effort is worth a listen if you’re interested in this sort of thing. Sperm whale vocalizations are like clicks rather than the more familiar whale sounds that have become favorite ambient noise tracks. It’s not exactly soothing background music, but interesting to listen to this clip.

Going back to my reading of Jarod Lanier, I think he’d caution against the whole hyped up title of the podcast that boldly claims we’re using AI to communicate with whales. To quote from his piece There is no A.I.:

A program like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can write sentences to order, is something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics. Programs that create images to order are something like a version of online image search, but with a system for combining the pictures. In both cases, it’s people who have written the text and furnished the images. The new programs mash up work done by human minds. What’s innovative is that the mashup process has become guided and constrained, so that the results are usable and often striking. This is a significant achievement and worth celebrating—but it can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between human creations, rather than as the invention of a new mind.

This is no way undermines the technological achievements behind an LLM. It’s changing the accent. Instead of a futuristic machine magically solving problems, the work of thousands of humans is being compared by a fancy calculator to make guesses how other humans and possibly non-humans communicate.

I’ve started to get more interested in the thought of Jaron Lanier. What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me is a short look at some of the points he originally wrote about in You Are Not a Gadget.

Music operates on a plane separate from literature, and a lot of information about it isn’t written down. Most of the world’s compositions were never notated, and what was written down is often minimal; although scores do exist for very old Chinese music—some of the oldest are for the noble guqin, a kind of zither—they amount to mnemonic devices, lists of strokes and playing positions. The earliest European scores are similar, with lists of notes. What we now call “early music” is largely a modern stylistic invention.

Western historiography excels at things that fit into the modern Western paradigm of writing, data, and computation. Music is a prime example of something that doesn’t fit into that mold. Meditation, spirituality, and religious practice are even harder nuts to crack.

What frustrates me is not that we don’t know many things and likely can’t know many things, it’s the lack of humility to assume that there’s nothing to be known if it doesn’t fit within the framework of Western knowledge.

The exquisite skills involved in making instruments can seem to hover just beyond the edge of scientific understanding, and can easily be lost when war, plague, and famine break the chains linking masters and apprentices. And yet the traditions of a lost musical culture can sometimes be revived.

And these oral traditions are exceedingly fragile and easy to lose forever. What I think is also often overlooked is that reconstructions based on written fragments are still fundamentally different than the original thing.

Changing course slightly, there’s a beautiful commentary on how true luxury comes from the from the physical over the digital:

The deeper difference is that computer models are made of abstractions—letters, pixels, files—while acoustic instruments are made of material. The wood in an oud or a violin reflects an old forest, the bodies who played it, and many other things, but in an intrinsic, organic way, transcending abstractions. Physicality got a bad rap in the past. It used to be that the physical was contrasted with the spiritual. But now that we have information technologies, we can see that materiality is mystical. A digital object can be described, while an acoustic one always remains a step beyond us.

And it’s the imperfections of the physical world that make it so much more beautiful than the cold sameness of the digital world:

Much of the music we enjoy today makes use of audio loops, by means of which a note can be repeated with absolute precision. Because of my work with computers, I had early access to looping tools, and I was able to play around with loops earlier than most musicians. At first, the techniques didn’t speak to me; music is about change, I thought, while loops are about artificially preventing change. When so-called minimalist composers—Philip Glass, Terry Riley—ask musicians to play the same phrases repeatedly, what emerges from this technique isn’t repetition but an exquisite awareness of change: using a traditional, physical instrument, each repetition reflects your breath, your pulse, the weather, the audience, the light, bringing subtlety into consciousness.