Singapore for a week without a single photo of the Merlion - wetlands, hornbills, empty rain-soaked parks, and the small human encounters most tourists miss.
talkie: a 13B language model trained only on pre-1931 text. no modern web, no leakage, no awareness of anything after 1930. that last part is what’s wild.
think about what this unlocks – archaeology, historiography, counterfactual history, reviewing past predictions of the future from the inside. every historian alive is contaminated by knowing what came next. talkie isn’t.
it’s also, i’d argue, the closest thing to a time travel experience we’ll ever get. physics doesn’t permit the real version in either direction (forward you just wait, backward causality says no). a conversation with something whose worldview ends in 1930, with no memory of WW2, no Hitler, no internet, is functionally the same trick.
now imagine the 17th century version. that’s the door this opens 🤯
arte dropped a line last week that’s been rattling around my skull: “the countries of the global South will grow old before they reach the prosperity of the North.”
i went looking for counter-evidence. found none. France took 115 years to double its elderly share. Vietnam will do it in 17. Japan hit aged-society status at 40k USD per capita. Vietnam will hit it at 5k. of 40 countries that crossed 13% elderly since 1972, only three were poorer than Vietnam is now.
the horror isn’t that it’s unfair, though it is. the horror is that it’s already decided. the kids who weren’t born in the 80s and 90s can’t be un-not-born. no election changes this. no reform. the math was locked in before most voters were alive to vote on it.
Stumbled across this video by Hal On Earth about Vietnam’s infamous power line chaos and it’s way better than the clickbait title suggests. Focused on Hà Nội but applies to Sài Gòn and the rest of the country just the same. It traces the whole spiderweb from 1895 French colonial power stations through wartime destruction, Đổi Mới-era rapid electrification, and the informal repair culture that turned every pole into an archaeological dig of cables. The term he coins – “additive infrastructure” – is perfect: systems shaped by survival, not strategy. If you’ve ever looked up at a Vietnamese intersection and thought “how does any of this spider web mess work”… this is your answer. Surprisingly detailed. Recommended watch.
New milestone in my ongoing quest to move all my software away from US tech companies toward non-American or open-source alternatives. Started small on Android – swapped Microsoft SwiftKey for FUTO Keyboard. 100% offline, fully private, running locally-hosted open-source OpenAI Whisper models for voice input. No cloud, no telemetry, no bullshit. Then migrated all Google services to Proton out of Switzerland – Proton Mail, Proton Drive, Proton Calendar, Proton Pass, the whole suite. Final boss: upgrading my gaming laptop from Windows 11 to Bazzite, a Fedora-based Linux distro designed to feel like Valve’s SteamOS while still functioning as a real computer. Worked fantastic out of the box. US tech companies are increasingly not neutral – not politically, not ideologically, not commercially. Digital sovereignty isn’t paranoia. It’s overdue.
RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999) simulated thousands of park guests on a Pentium. In Assembly. Written by one guy. Lars Thießen digs into how – and the details are wilder than you’d expect. Guests don’t pathfind. They wander blind until they stumble into a ride. “I can’t find the park exit” isn’t a bug – it’s the pathfinder hitting its performance budget and giving up. Game formulas were designed around powers of two so the CPU could bitshift instead of multiply. Every byte of memory was hand-picked per variable. The kicker: none of this works without the game designer and the programmer being the same person. Chris Sawyer didn’t just optimize code, he optimized the design itself around what the hardware could do. Most modern builders can’t touch that framerate with a thousand times the silicon. Absolute must-read.
Late night thoughts: Every answer births a question it can’t silence. Gödel proved formal systems can’t fully validate themselves from within. Not philosophy – math. And physics rhymes. Particle horizons, event horizons, causal horizons – not unsolved obstacles. Walls built into spacetime. Two disciplines, two kinds of blindness, both structural, both forever. We build elegant, powerful, incomplete systems. Lanterns in a darkness with no edges. We map the walls. Prove EXACTLY why we’ll never see past them. The dream of a theory of everything promises unification. Gödel promises it won’t be the last word. The horizons promise words we’ll never hear. And yet. Still asking. Still building lanterns…
Something I’ve noticed in German media – public broadcasting included, though I’ll admit this is a subjective read and I’m not immune to my own bias: when a new war breaks out, the dominant angle isn’t human lives, it’s economic fallout. Inflation. Growth forecasts. Stock exchange jitters. Tourist bookings. The wars in Somalia, Myanmar, Sudan, Yemen? Sure, Western interests track those too – quietly, when there are resources or proxy stakes involved. But they rarely make the front page. Economically inconvenient, strategically distant, largely invisible.
I know it’s not only this. Humanitarian reporting exists. But the priority ordering – what leads, what frames the story – tells you something. My read: we’re living through a phase of capitalism so advanced in its abstraction that human suffering has become a secondary variable in a model. A tragedy, not a catastrophe. A data point, not a rupture.
Not end times (yet). Just… numbers all the way down 😐
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within bankrupted a studio, changed cinema forever, and looked like a game I desperately wanted to play. Twenty-five years later, I found it on Netflix.
Ho Chi Minh City is building $100B+ in infrastructure simultaneously - metro lines, airports, highways, an entire new CBD, and a city reclaimed from the sea. A deep dive from someone whose bedroom window overlooks the chaos.
