Steeves

I feel like I say this every year but I really need people to hear it. Halloween is the best American holiday. Just kids outside welcomed into their world, marching around together, showing off their costumes to the elderly, parents meeting parents, neighbors catching up with neighbors.

this is, hands down, the best video I've seen on men's influencer content and it's not close either

Deskilling is real.

This is the world generative AI peddlers long for, one where people are incompetent without their service.

Don't outsource your brain to this shit. You'll regret it.

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

I think that if you're a writer and you don't invent a word every now and then you're missing out on a solid chunk of the fun.

But God damn it. It was really nice. And I think that I do probably feel like that more often than I think I do. The big bad things are big and bad, and should be resisted and oh god now I'm talking about the NOW...

Point is, joy sneaks in. Don't ignore it when it does. Enjoy stupid little joy.

2. It's INCREDIBLY stupid. Every part of that story was dumb as rocks, but especially the surge of pleasure my brain treated me to by being unexectedly mildly competent. What has become of me? Is this all it takes, brain? Any port in a storm?

Two important things about this story.

1: It's a little thing, and we have a lot more of those happen to us than the big things. And big things are fine! Nothing against them. But if someone gives me the choice to pet a horse or a MINIATURE horse, I'm going with the little guy.

So I grabbed the lids, got a mint and a chamomile, and brought it upstairs to drink with my wife! I felt incredible, finding those lids! Like goddam Macguyver. If he just... looked a little and found the stuff he needed instead of inventing it.

I do not. But failure is not an option. So I start rummaging through the cabinets below the zone; cabinets that I think should be locked, but it only made sense that a place that probably had to restock daily wouldn't actually lock it. And they didn't!

Again, no one to ask where to find them, though I'm not convinced I would ask if there were because it was late at night and I was wearing a tank top that said "butts," but this means I have a dilemma. Do I really want to carry hot tea to the thrid floor of the hotel with no lids?

I get to the tea-coffee zone (this is an awkward description, but I don't currently have the language to name or describe where you get tea and coffee from in a hotel lobby accurately), and am thinking about pouring myself a cup, but DISASTER, there are no lids for the disposable cups.

I'm traveling with my family, staying at a hotel, and my wonderful wife asks me to run downstairs and grab her some tea from dining hall. I do, because I'm considerate and handsome and she has a scratchy throat. It's late, and there's no one around.

Stupid Little Joy must, by definition, be Stupid and Little. That means I don't have to put in the effort of trying to be joyful in big, important moments. Just a dumb little thing, and often it's effortless! Here's an example:

I've decided to implement a new policy in my life: noticing moments of Stupid Little Joy. The world is bad! Everyone won't shut up about it (rightfully)! And to preserve my mental health, I try to embrace a positive, hopeful mindset, but ya'll know that can be hard. But this is the genius of the SLJ

People who use AI think that they’re skipping to the success when they’re skipping to the failure. You begin and end your life as someone who has not written the novel, you did not teach yourself to express what was inside of you, you died without making something that no one else could make.

This sounds like a bit but I’m being serious: kids using chat gpt for their homework are denying themselves the invaluable experience of learning how to bullshit their way through a problem. You drink some caffeine the night before and figure it the fuck out. That’s a skill. You need it in life.

I am surrounded by people who are outsourcing their own thinking to ChatGPT and they are quickly and obviously becoming dependent on it for even the most banal tasks. Once again, the "figuring it out" is the important part. Yes, you can use a crane to lift weights but you will not get stronger

Hitchhiker's Guide. The BBC miniseries, which led me to the books. Genuinely changed the trajectory of my life.

We like our artists starving, our actors charismatic, our authors brilliant, our musicians weird and alienating. People who like AI art are people who are predisposed to accept AI. People who aren't won't, regardless of any "objective" measure of quality, whatever that is.

I teach rhetoric, and one thing I think a lot about is art and entertainment as a form of rhetoric (Comedy, for instance, needs to convince people to laugh). I think one thing that is currently complicating the idea of "quality" AI art is that Ethos matters when considering the quality of art.

This kid is 15, and so has a moral clarity and uprightness that no adult elected official would or could ever have. There aren't really and never have been two sides of this issue, but if it has to be argued as a binary thing I don't see how anything less than this could seem like the side to be on.

at the core of andor is a very simple thing that i think about a lot the older i get and the more loss i naturally accrue: we are made up of all the people we've ever loved or respected, crown to heels

It’s weird to live in a time when basic principles like cruelty is wrong, cheating is empty & the idea that curiosity, generosity, originality, the satisfaction of earned accomplishments & loving intimacy are the center of a good life feel like countercultural concepts

That is some moral clarity.

“This is violence disguised as law.”

Words to live by.

PANEL 1: The rat cartoonist and Jeremy the Duck are watching the cartoonist draw with a gigantic Apple Pencil on a gigantic iPad on a cluttered desk. CARTOONIST: "I find it often helps to simply open with a sincere anxiety simply expressed" PANEL 2: CARTOONIST: "Then you've got a premise for another character to play against or add to" JEREMY: "The illusion of a fuller universe!" PANEL 3: CARTOONIST: "Don't write jokes, wander into them. You're doing this to find a path forward from panel one's agitation to anything else, even if there's no punchline." JEREMY: "Because it's a private ritual against despair anyway." PANEL 4: CARTOONIST: "Exactamundo, Jeremy. The best jokes will reveal themselves to the faithful at the moment they are needed. Until then, breathe, move the pen, keep your heart." PANEL 5: The cartoonist draws a big sweeping line. JEREMY: "And that's it?" CARTOONIST: "Yeah, and the fucked up thing is, you won't improve until you stop caring if you improve."

how to

www.noncanon.com/comics/2025-...

I can't speak for anyone else,

But a thing that I am finding is really helping me to get through all this nonsense

is helping others.

It can be something small- sharing a job ad with a fired colleague, looking over a resume- or something larger.

But helping others helps me.