The Dutch government recommends that people not eat eggs from backyard chickens:

RIVM scientists assessed the PFAS content in eggs from 60 different locations across the country and found that eggs from 31 of them contained so much PFAS that eating less than one egg a week would exceed official limits. At a further 10 locations, people could eat at most one egg per week without exceeding the limit.

This was buried in the news but should be making headlines. We could slowly be getting to the point where much of the earth is too toxic to produce food safely.

I think this also demonstrates why the environmental movement has made a huge mistake by becoming almost singularly focused on carbon emissions. They are abstract, absolutely necessary to sustain the world’s population for now, and the effect is going to largely beyond our lifetimes. Instead, focusing on toxic chemicals, microplastics, and other things in the here and now is a far easier sell for the environmental movement and far less wrapped up in partisan politics.

The company Boom is working to build a new supersonic airliner. In a recent interview, the founder extolled saving a few hours of flight time:

When I call Blake Scholl from New York, he says it’s a shame we couldn’t have met at his office in Colorado. If only there were a supersonic jet that could cruise at 1.7 times the speed of sound, and get me there two hours quicker than the typical JFK-to-Denver route.

That true, from a certain point of view. It’s also indicative of tech bro thinking. Of all the places to shave time off of a transcontinental flight, the speed of the airplane is an odd place to look. But the tech bros approach everything as an engineering problem to be solved rather than a community issue that multiple stakeholder can address.

Getting to JFK is a transportation nightmare. Instead of direct trains to the airport, you have to get to Jamaica station first and then take a slow “people mover” to actually get to the airport. Improving public transportation would also improve driving times as there would be less traffic. That’s an easy way to save half an hour or more and would apply to nearly every major airport in the US.

The main reason you have to get to the airport so early is for the security theatre. If they stopped the nonsense with the shoes and upselling “faster” screening, and instead simply staffed the airport well enough to allow passengers to get through this in a few minutes, you’d save another hour.

Of course, the rebuttal is that there’s no funding for either of these radical ideas. But isn’t it odd that building a functional train from Manhattan to JFK or hiring a few more low-paid staff is impossible but building supersonic luxury jets is a practical solution?

It’s spring, which means it’s time for some garden inspiration and to get to work. I’ve really come to like the sort of no-lawn, more natural meadow style approach, and it’s perfect for the tiny garden we have. It’s not like we’re going to play a game of football on a five square meter lawn. Instead, we’re going to sit outside, enjoy the sunshine, have fun watching all the critters around—something green and living sure beats the cement pavers that are (were?) so popular in the Netherlands.

So I naturally looked to YouTube and Reddit for some ideas, and it really just shows the problems with American society. The UK channels are about gardening. People get excited when their little wildlife pond attracts some dragonflies. And that’s it.

The American channels go on about how evil late stage capitalism is, that lawns are an example of systemic racism, and use these ten affiliate links to buy things. That’s all well and good, but that’s not what I’m here for. It’s also bizarre to see Americans on Reddit going bananas over UK posters planting “non-native” species, not seeming to get that it’s a relative designation. Things like bugleweed, which, incidentally, I ended planting along my shady northern edge, are very much native to this part of the world. Or there’s a whole group screaming that Dutch clover isn’t truly a “no lawn” plant—which I planted in my sunny corner.

This sort of parochialism, hostility, and drive for ideological purity that’s divorced from reality has come to define the MAGA movement, but when looking at US culture from the outside, is clearly just what much of American culture has become. It’s just weird that even completely non-political hobbies are dragged into the culture wars and turned into soapboxes for grandstanding. It’s also hard to avoid because of the size of the US and there simply being more resources for many things in English. My only way around this has been to try and limit search results to the UK.

To leave on a high note, this has become one of my favourite channels. Enjoy!

From the Guardian:

Police have raided a Quaker meeting house and arrested six women attending a gathering of the protest group Youth Demand.

More than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with Tasers, forced their way into the Westminster meeting house at 7.15pm, according to a statement by the Quakers.

“No one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory,” said Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain.

“This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalises protest.

“Freedom of speech, assembly, and fair trials are an essential part of free public debate which underpins democracy.”

I hope this sparks a deeper discussion of the role of religion, ethics, and how those values should be manifested in society.

Even though it’s a right-wing talking point, anarcho-tyranny is a relevant concept. The police don’t have the resources to stop obvious and blatant crime on the streets, yet they have the resources to raid a church to arrest youngsters planning a protest.

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.