This Rob Stephenson almost cured my trauma about living in Alphabet City. Guess I have to go visit Woodhaven now. Ugh I should do flashcards again. Ikea: MUJI of the West. Why the fuck is it that when I go to a bank and ask for help they just call the support staff for me? Sweet patio11 with the answer, which is honestly deeply unsatisfying but I read the follow up article anyway. I did not figure out why the US has so many pedestrian deaths, nor did I come up with any good ideas with the followup. I can’t wait for a summer New York day to see Edenwald.

The whole article kind of feels like a prank, but read a little bit just to see the rising height of Chinese people. Mandatory Yao Ming mention — this article is surprisingly good at characterising the Party and comes with this hilarious video of his family trying to react to his draft pick. Why the Chinese elite are in Japan, which notably advertises a Chinese-language bookstore in Tokyo I’ll trawl. They rudely don’t include restaurant recommendations whilst talking about how you can get good Szechuan food in Japan. This Chinese vibe coder is doing it right.

Rising wholesale electricity prices. The Face of Ice is a good way to think about this whole ASI-is-coming-are-we-ready thing. I would probably enjoy Ursula K. Le Guin but I’m busy with the whole ASI-is-coming-are-we-ready thing. A beautiful story about electricity and whispers of my socialist-libertarian utopia. There’s really good New Deal posters and other sorts of propaganda at the Poster House in NYC that’s worth seeing. Rocket scaling.

What happened to us? Why isn’t this a thing anymore? Other than the ASI thing I was really born into the wrong era.

Insane acts of kubernetes. Brief message on an AI incident? Rarity: an ML paper I liked. Beautiful plots about newlines.

Bugonia

Many of the Lanthimos movies are kind of pervy, which I love (my favourite continues to be Dogtooth). Bugonia opens the movie by castrating the male characters and shaving Emma Stone’s hair off in a clean establishment that no pervy business will be going on. It was a strong opening for me (and presumably for beloved Avator director, James Cameron) as Jesse Plemons explaining why castration is a good idea strongly resembled a conversation I had with a friend a few weeks prior. Bugonia is about intellectual and class nihilism, the two most important kinds of nihilism! It’s also kind of about being your authentic self — something which one must never be nihilistic about.

Crime and Punishment

I get the hype with Dostoevsky: the characters are consistent embodiments of particular archetypes, the prose is functional, and everything is filled with emotional honesty. There’s a sense that he has a lot of distaste for all his characters though doesn’t allow anyone to be single dimensional.

The first two thirds of the book are slow with the characters psychologically accurately repeating themselves. It does pay off in the end, particularly because I was reading the scene where Raskolnikov most uncouthly expresses his exceptionalist beliefs when I got the text that Caroline Ellison was being released from prison. These themes around intellectually appealing but morally corrosive ideas are familiar to me — they should be familiar to all Bay Area people. Raskolnikov’s feeling isolation and guilt are highly redeeming qualities, in reality people are far more internally avoidant. It makes sense that this is the Dostoevsky that the Silicon valley favours, but I suspect it’s a Power Broker situation where readers somehow land on the wrong side of what the author is trying to communicate.

The foils in Crime and Punishment are obvious and extreme, and would be exceedingly so if not for the fact that they manage to complicate the characters. I’m at least a few standard deviations above the mean for how much romance I read out of it, but Sonya and Raskolnikov’s connection is deeply romantic. It doesn’t really matter if they like (or love) each other, but that they are very much programmed to exist well in each other’s lives. I think that’s romantic.

Frankenstein

I’m so glad this movie was done well, the book is really unmatched in terms of literature about father issues (in both directions). It’s ridiculous that vampires became the goth fixation for teenage girls. I usually consider the angst of a love-hate relationship and clinical loneliness from fatherly abandonment to be kind of a cheap thrill, but Frankenstein dresses it up for me enough that I can enjoy it.