Hello there, reader. This is Vishal, and welcome back to another issue of Kat’s Kable, where you’re going to get ten great things to read. I don’t have too much to say - so enjoy the articles and let me know what you liked best!

1. 3100 - Victory Journal

I’d shared Children in the Garden: On Life at a 3,100-Mile Race allll the way back in issue #262 (it also marked my big love for Devin Kelly), and this is another longread about the same 3100 mile race - that you run over 52 days around a single block in New York. Just so enjoyable. And amazing pictures.

2. Whose Time? Which Temporality? - LM Sacasas’ Substack

Always a big fan of Convivial Society, LM Sacasas’ newsletter, and this 2023 post from him is no exception. I stumbled upon it while looking at some recent notes by him on sunrise, sunset and dusk - here he talks about how we’ve conquered the night with electric light and how to not think of that as a “triumph”, and how we’ve gotten less and less “gradual passages of time” in our lives and days. It’s a good meditation in today’s day and age.

3. ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman - Shtetl Optimized

Harvey Lederman is an analytic philosopher who’s been thinking about AI, and how it’s rise has brought on a sense of existential dread in him. I think a lot of us feel this, but Lederman, being erudite and eloquent, goes into a lot more detail - exploring various threads to their logical (and to some extent, emotional) ends.

But even with these tasks before us, my fits of dread are here to stay. I know that the post-instrumental world could be a much better place. But its coming means the death of my culture, the end of my way of life. My fear and grief about this loss won’t disappear because of some choice consolatory words. But I know how to relish the twilight too. I feel lucky to live in a time where people have something to do, and the exploits around me seem more poignant, and more beautiful, in the dusk. We may be some of the last to enjoy this brief spell, before all exploration, all discovery, is done by fully automated sleds.

4. “Foundation”: The Bold Bet On Moore’s Law That Changed India’s Destiny - Tigerfeathers

I’ve been enjoying the long essays Tigerfeathers puts out, and this one from 2024 is no exception. India’s UIDAI/Aadhar project relies on deduplication, i.e., making sure someone already in the database isn’t issued a new ID. A big way that they saved costs is by going against expert advice while setting up their deduplication servers and installing cheap general-purpose CPUs rather than application-specific ICs just for deduplication. What they relied on was that the CPUs themselves would get a lot better between 2014 and 2020 (when deduplication would become much more of an intensive task), and it worked! Great decision.

5. What it takes to live near an elephant herd - Washington Post

Nice photo-essay capturing and going into some details of the realities of living next to elephants in India’s Nilgiri hills.

6. AI and the End of the Human Writer - New Republic

An essay similar to #3 above, but the key point that I’m walking away with is this: we use writing as a way of figuring things out, figuring ourselves out, and figuring the world out - AI can help with parts of the “figuring out”, but it’s the act of writing in many cases that plays a key role.

7. Dicing an Onion the Mathematically Optimal Way - Pudding

What a fun fun interactive visualization if you want to nerd out about how best to dice an onion. What’s the angle of the cuts? Should you do the horizontal cuts? Does this even matter? Someone also built an even more detailed version of this: Onion Cutting Simulator.

8. No Great Stagnation in Guinness - The Fitzwilliam

I knew that Guinness is a stalwart of a brand, with it even predating the modern state of Ireland itself. This is a deep dive into Guinness’ founding history, how they stayed (and continue to stay!) innovative, relevant and world-leading. It’s quite amazing, and in particular I loved Project ACORN (Advanced Cans of Rich Nectar, LOL) which tried to replicate a pint poured from kegs at a bar in a home aluminum can. Crazy.

9. A Type Designer’s Take on Indian Sign Painting - BLAG Magazine

Very fun pictures exploring hand-painted signs across urban and even rural/peri-urban India.

10. It’s What You See - Eashan Ghosh on Medium

I talked about this piece in the last issue. It’s a 2022 45 minute read about Roger Federer. And I read it again. And loved it just as much. Why not share again?