2025-03-25
empire
Matt Lakeman on the conquest of the Incan Empire. This part about how the armor protected the Spanish against Incan knives and slings such that no one would be killed, but everyone would be injured, reminds me of this time I was playing paintball with surrender only for elimination, and this one guy just ran at the enemy team, tanking everything until he ran out of ammo. If raw toughness was the single most important metric the conquistadors were selecting for, it explains why some very apparent personality disorders were excused.
EFD on the empire as an anachronism, and justifications for modern city-states. This is a theory I also ascribe to, that centralized empires existed because of the benefits it provided towards coordination, and the “reason empires have declined…is that there is less “need” for them in terms of solving coordination problems” thanks to advances in technology. But there’s also an interesting question here about cultural legibility, which is often talked about in the context of Imperial China and it’s tributary states. It’s a theory of mine (which I held more strongly in the past, but still hold to some extent) that if China were to adopt the trappings of a western democracy, basically becoming a better version of the United States, then the majority of the US itself would actually be fine being supplanted. I wonder why, given the historical precedent of tributary states, China’s ability to rewrite their own past, their insistence that they are a democracy (of a unique kind), and having grown their economy past the point where Taiwan is capable of supplanting them, why they haven’t steered Taiwan Strait relations to something more befitting both parties.
Asimov Press on the serratia marcescens bacterium. A lot is made of how lots of scientific innovation comes out of random chance occurrences, it’s even weirder to me how other aspects come out of things like a bacterium looking like blood, which appear superficially the same, but are actually even more unlikely as the result of a random process over a long duration of time.
Henrik Karlsson on homeschooling. There seem to be two principal origin stories for heterodox thinkers, one of them being lies about gender, and the other going through public education as a “gifted” kid. The link between these two bode poorly for the Department of Education after DOGE is done with it. It would be ironic if, in doing so, the populist right ends up dramatically reducing the supply of intellectual right-wingers in the future.
PSmith review of Craft, and Dialectic Podcast interview with CW&T. I’ve never understood this impulse myself, and it seems like AI is not a really good motivator for this, which if anything will automate the CAD portion of custom production of parts from Shenzhen.
David Hoang on vibe-coding with speculation on how associated infrastructure might change to accommodate this new paradigm. Perhaps I shouldn’t write about this because it was someone else’s idea, but my readership is small enough that I guess it shouldn’t matter. The idea is that every function (plus it’s unit tests) would have its own separate file with specific input and output typing, and when importing a function you would also specify the particular version you are using (something like `import foo@d1a3bb4`). This is akin to enforcing a particular usage of version control on your project, and would be implemented and managed as a code-editor plugin. He actually had this idea because he was frustrated about how his juniors were committing LLM generated code and screwing things up, and he wanted a way to quarantine their changes away. But under a less adversarial perspective, it’s actual extremely well-suited to team vibe-coding: in addition to limiting damage from an increased rate of code conflicts, it also keeps your file sizes small, while forcing the use of typing and functional programming. It’s actually a very next-level idea that I didn’t appreciate properly the first time I heard it.
A short story by Azeez which is interesting because of how it meshes two diametrically opposed concepts, the gentle acceptance of a woman, and the shock and shame of almost drowning.
Peter Attia podcast episode on ways to get better sleep, which is apparently one of the most effective interventions there is for health.
Works in Progress linkthread.
