Hi there, reader. Good morning, and welcome to another tardy issue of your favourite internet newsletter, Kat’s Kable. As usual, ten (nope, just nine this time) great things to read. I’ve been under the weather, and honestly a bit overwhelmed as I fell sick once at the end of 2024 and now again in a month! Life has had too many moving parts, including me (travel catches up to you eventually). I’m looking forward to feeling alright in a day or two and then taking this opportunity to reprioritize what I want to in life. I feel like mentally, I’ve gotten to a pretty good place now after some ups and downs last year - I feel very much on “even keel” and I’m starting to feel a sense of groundedness that I need and that’s been evading me for a bit. I hope I don’t sound like a self-help book!
As always, enjoy the newsletter - it should be a fun one.
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1. These Prime Numbers Are So Memorable That People Hunt for Them (Scientific American):
Lovely piece about amateur prime number hunting. I found out that the number 12,345,678,910,987,654,321 is prime!
2. Dwarkesh Podcast Progress Update (Dwarkesh Patel’s Substack):
I’ve never listened to Dwarkesh’s podcast yet, but after reading this update from him, I might! It started off as a temporary passion project, and has now morphed into this amazing thing that’s taken on its own life. I like this:
A lot of great people ask to come on the podcast. But I usually say no. I choose guests not based on whether I want to spend two hours chatting with them, but whether I would learn a lot by spending two weeks preparing. It’s a high bar, and it’s often uncorrelated with how famous they are.
3. Platforms Rule Everything Around Me (Tharin Pillay’s Substack):
Nice essay about how almost all of our online communications are now mediated by platforms (think Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, even dating apps) and how the adage “the medium is the message” applies now.
4. What’s going on here, with this human? (Graham Duncan’s Blog):
I somehow came across a few posts on Graham Duncan’s blog - he works in investments and the about section of his blog says “I’m always looking for new ways of seeing reality, particularly the reality of what makes people tick”. This essay is in that direction - he’s talking about different frameworks he uses to judge people in the context of hiring them. It’s really good! I imagine I’ll keep going back to it.
5. The reality of the Danish fairytale (David Heinemeier Hanson’s blog):
DHH is the creator of the web framework Ruby on Rails and is currently leading Basecamp. This post is not about him in tech though, it’s about Denmark and how he thinks the Danish way of doing things is very different from the American way.
6. How to Get Rich From Peeping Inside People’s Fridges (WIRED):
Tassos Stassopoulos is the founder of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm - he’s pioneered this unique idea of doing surveys of what’s in people’s fridges to determine what to invest in next.
“I realized that the answer is the fridge!” he said. “The fridge could tell me how people would behave once they had some extra money—before they even know it themselves.”
7. The Hyperloop: A 200-Year History of Hype and Failure (The MIT Press Reader):
Vaclav Smil’s writing is almost always worth reading, and I enjoyed this one about the history of the Hyperloop and how the concept has come and gone in different forms over the years, and simply hasn’t worked or been feasible.
8. Murder on the Mekong (Atavist Magazine):
“A reporter travels to the scene of a crime that transfixed East Asia and finds a tale of adventure, deception, and political intrigue.” This sounds like it’s straight out of fiction! It’s a long but engrossing read.
9. Life’s Swell (Outside Online):
“To be a surfer girl in Maui is to be the luckiest of creatures. It means you’re beautiful and tan and ready to rip. It means you’ve caught the perfect dappled wave and are on a ride that can’t possibly end.” I loved this essay so much. It captures so many emotions - being carefree, so invested in something, living something dreamlike and ephemeral. Outside Online has marked this one as one of their “Outside Classics” - even they know this is one of the best they’ve ever published.
