Sandeep Atal

it’s fascinating how much modern internet driven capitalism turns everything into a slop bowl. starting with chipotle, through to infinite salad places, etc. if you think deeply it makes a ton of sense because the bowl is the perfect capitalist vessel.. it’s: - incredibly modular (swap proteins/bases, same labor flow) - easily swappable labor - optimized for throughput (assembly is linear, no plating skills required) - margin friendly (+ tons of room for upsells) - instagram native (overhead shot, radial food composition, screams “healthy”) this same dynamic is now proliferating across froyo which is effectively yet another sorta premium slop bowl (+ insane lines too boot) which also costs upwards of $15-20 per instance. pretty fascinating to see internet driven convergence of every dynamic.

Okay, time to explain the Imperial system, the metric system, and why attempts to replace either with the other are all retarded. They have two different purposes. The metric system is designed around precise measurement of objects. Its goal is to make engineering and scientific calculations simple. The Imperial system is designed around humans. Its goal is to make calculation unnecessary. 100 degrees is really hot. 0 degrees is really cold. Anything that starts with a 5 is cool, anything that starts with an 8 is warm. No computation. 6 feet is tall, 5 feet is short. 100 pounds is light, 200 pounds is substantial, 300 pounds is heavy. A 1000 square foot house is small, a 2000 square foot house is medium, a 3000 square foot house is large. 1 mile is a short walk, 2 miles is a medium walk, after that it takes a while. 1 acre of land is a homestead, 10 acres is an estate, 100 acres and up is a ranch or a farm. Do you see now why it is so strange and awkward to convert from miles to feet? It's because converting from miles to feet is not something you're supposed to do in the first place. Yes, they are both measures of length, so they are technically convertible, and yes, on rare occasions, you might need to do that. But feet are for measuring humans, and things built around humans, like doorways, and mattresses. Miles are for measuring travel distance. You wouldn't measure the distance between Seattle and Portland in feet for the same reason you wouldn't measure the distance between Tokyo and Osaka in mattress-lengths. It would be silly. This is why Americans so fiercely resistant to any notion of "conversion" to the metric system. Because it makes no sense. We already use the metric system for what it's good for, which is doing physics and chemistry and whatnot. But converting everyday measurements to the metric system would be less useful, generally inconvenient, and serve no purpose other than to make petty government bureaucrats happy that everything is now tidy, orderly, and worse, three qualities that bureaucrats love. I thought about this carefully when I wrote my first science fiction novel. In the world of the 22nd century, extraterrestrial settlers ("Orbitals") use three systems of measurement. They measure themselves in feet, inches, and pounds. They measure the spacecraft and habitats they build in meters and centimeters, grams and kilograms. And they measure space travel distances in light-seconds and light-minutes. Each system has its own natural scale. The sole exception to this is when Marcus doses himself with drugs for high-g resistance, Miranda objects that he has taken too much, and Marcus responds by stating his mass... in kilograms. Why? Because they're talking about drug doses, a engineering measurement. Drugs are dosed in milligrams per kilogram. So, yes, the Imperial system makes perfect sense when you understand what it's for, and no, we ain't changing. And, as a general rule, when an entire civilization of smart people does something for centuries, and it makes no sense to you, they're probably not being silly. It's more likely there's something you don't know.

type of shit jordan peterson would say with tears running down his face

My viral tweet about the apple guy? Same take here. Civilization was built by this kind of person. There was a survival show that aired some years ago, I forgot the name of it, but this one guy was the least popular dude in the group. While everyone else was fishing or gathering firewood or collecting water, he was spending hours weaving and testing a fishnet. After several failed attempts everyone hated his guts for not contributing. Then, finally, the net worked. And he caught more fish singlehanded in one day than multiple people could've done, casting and hooking one at a time. The lesson is that a certain % of society are creative thinkers.... and it's not always immediately obvious what benefit they bring. They consume resources while spending days, months, or years buried in projects that others either don't believe in or don't give a fuck about. Sometimes, those bets don't pay off. But sometimes, they do. And the windfall is huge for the entire group. @rorysutherland speaks of this with his waggle-dance bees analogy. A big problem in our society is that we literally don't know how to price or value creative work. The value is often enormous yet non-obvious. You can't spreadsheet it, so society is biased against it by default.

Did the customer ever ask for this? open.substack.com/pub/creditwort…

Everyone is always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk hire. Every first date you’ve ever been on they’ve been rooting for you to get laid. Every time you started to tell a joke people hoped it would have a hilarious punch line. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themself, meaning the deck is never stacked against you, and your failures are completely your own

The curse of being the smart child is that you are genetically coded to be your family's unpaid crisis manager—and the world's. A massive 2024 population registry study published in The Economic Journal proved that higher general fluid intelligence directly causes increased altruism, cooperation, and prosocial behavior. Because an intelligent brain calculates long-term consequences and systemic risks faster than everyone else around it, it sees the family or societal trainwreck coming miles away. It means you are either a psychological hostage to your own foresight, or a reluctant savior trying to fix a world that doesn't even see the cliff it’s walking over.

After watching this, Looks like we’ve all been trapped by what we saw at first glance.

Ask Claude to document and describe the main flows in your app and output in a single page html + json data file. Incredibly useful for humans and the JSON file is very useful for explaining the flow to the LLM when working on new features/bugfixes.

Building AI applications is more like gardening than like construction. When you 'build' something, you know where everything is and how it interacts with its environment and the stresses and strains it takes. When you garden, you plant seeds and let it grow, keep an eye on the health and intervene only where necessary. Now that we've unleashed the golems, there's no point in knowing exactly how the system is built. Rather we must train ourselves to spot the diseases - the antipatterns, the two components that should be the same but look different, and so on. Tools for checking code health and tests for verifying behaviour are all the understanding we need. for the rest, let the agents cook.

«I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with» — Isaac Asimov (I Asimov, 1995)

I’m tired of the Aristotelian physics slander. Yes, heavier object fall faster than light ones, all else equal, *when immersed in a fluid* which is every environment Aristotle had access to. Do the experiment yourself. Drop a bowling ball and a same-sized ball of foam. There’s a great paper called “Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look” that demonstrates how Aristotelian physics is a special case approximation of Newtonian physics in the same way Newtonian physics is a special case approximation of relativity and QM. Aristotle’s physics reigned for so long not because people were unthinkingly dogmatic, but because it was genuinely hard to come up with better models. Aristotle had to model celestial objects separately from terrestrial objects because his terrestrial model is describing *terminal* velocity and breaks down in the zero-friction limit. So he had two incompatible models. Newton unified them. Now we have two incompatible models - QM and GR - and are looking for unification. The more things change…

The hottest new programming language is English

Here’s something I find interesting about Bezos. Unlike the Baby Boom entrepreneurs (Jobs, Gates) who saw themselves as messiahs or a millennial entrepreneur (Zuckerberg) who aimed to recreate the social order, Bezos is the embodiment of a Gen X entrepreneur. Fundamentally, he founded a logistics company that delivers products more efficiently to consumers. And unlike those guys, how many times had you ever seen a speech by Bezos or some stage performance. This is literally the first time I have ever come across a talk by Bezos and it is many years old. Gen X—get the job done right and don’t talk about it. That’s the challenge for @RonDeSantis, the classic Gen X politician, who makes government work competently rather than talking about it. Which why I think the Baby Boom and millennial reporters think he’s boring.

I am going to tell you a deep secret of the English language. When we want to tell the truth, we use Germanic-derived words. When we want to lie, we use Latin-derived words. - Germanic (Old English) words → concrete, direct, sensory, testable - Latinate/French words → abstract, bureaucratic, distancing, often euphemistic Death / harm Germanic (plain, testable):kill, die, hurt Latinate (distancing, euphemistic):terminate, expire, neutralize, collateral damage 👉 “We killed civilians” vs “There was collateral damage” Lying / deception Germanic:lie, cheat, hide Latinate:misrepresent, obfuscate, prevaricate 👉 “He lied” vs “He misrepresented the facts” Money / exploitation Germanic:take, steal, pay Latinate:appropriate, extract, leverage, monetize 👉 “They’re taking your money” vs “They’re extracting value” War / violence Germanic:fight, bomb, burn Latinate:engagement, kinetic action, force projection 👉 “We bombed them” vs “We conducted kinetic operations” Bureaucracy / responsibility Germanic:you broke it, you did it Latinate:mistakes were made, systemic failure occurred 👉 Notice how the subject disappears. Money / exploitation Germanic:take, steal, pay Latinate:appropriate, extract, leverage, monetize 👉 “They’re taking your money” vs “They’re extracting value” War / violence Germanic:fight, bomb, burn Latinate:engagement, kinetic action, force projection 👉 “We bombed them” vs “We conducted kinetic operations” Bureaucracy / responsibility Germanic:you broke it, you did it Latinate:mistakes were made, systemic failure occurred 👉 Notice how the subject disappears. If you see a public statement filled with Latin-sounding words, you are being fooled, tricked, manipulated, or lied to.

No one tells you that parenting is just relearning the world through someone who thinks worms are friends & birds are miracles. It’s the most healing thing I’ve ever done. My daughter looked out the window this morning & said, everything is green & growing. I told her, you too. And something inside me whispered, so are you. Now I’m watching her hold flowers up to the sun while the light bends like it recognizes her. It’s funny, every spring I think I’m teaching my child about the world & every spring she proves she’s the one teaching me how to see it.

You should be using Claude Code to run your entire work day. Here's exactly how, from @thevibePM, field CPO at $2.6B @pendoio: 1:47 - The one command that plans his whole day 21:42 - His Claude.MD Setup 33:42 - Skills vs MCP vs Hooks 40:11 - Why he left Cursor for terminal

The token cost to build a production feature is now lower than the meeting cost to discuss building that feature. Let me rephrase. It is literally cheaper to build the thing and see if it works than to have a 30 minute planning meeting about whether you should build it. It’s wild when you think about it. This completely inverts how you should run a software organization. The planning layer becomes the bottleneck because the building layer is essentially free. The cost of code has dropped to essentially 0. The rational response is to eliminate planning for anything that can be tested empirically. Don’t debate whether a feature will work. Just build it in 2 hours, measure it with a group of customers, and then decide to kill or keep it. I saw a startup operating this way and their build velocity is up 20x. Decision quality is up because every decision is informed by a real prototype, not a slide deck and an expensive meeting. We went from “move fast and break things” to “move fast and build everything.” The planning industrial complex is dead. Thank god.

The industrial era forced humans into a deterministic analytic role. This produced the mindset: analyze → derive → construct. But natural systems are not solvable analytically. They are search problems. This includes economies, biology, software ecosystems and scientific discovery. AI allows humanity to shift from deterministic construction to rapid guided exploration of solution space. This is what 99.9% of your brain is wired to do. Exploration, discovery in non-analytic systems, restoring the original cognitive mode. Devolving humanity, by placing analytical thinking on a pedestal in an age of AI, will dramatically decrease humanity’s experimental throughput and retard progress. All for a dumb definition of "smart" that worked during the industrial revolution. The low-level analytical thinkers loved their privileged position. But it was always a contrived, (genuinely artificial) version of intelligence. It rewarded a kind of myopic dumbness that was truly bad at making discoveries. These people would never has survived the jungle. And we're about to bring back the jungle. May the new kings rise.

I get blown away every time I read this paragraph by Carl Jung: To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test.