Kat’s Kable #358

Ahoy there, reader, and welcome to another Sunday issue of Kat’s Kable! It’s been a busy week, well, it’s been a busy few weeks, and promises to remain so for another few weeks. Ha! Nothing should get in the way of quality reading, though, and here I am with ten great things to read as usual. I was talking yesterday with my folks about quantum mechanics and the double slit experiment and such and realized my grasp of these concepts isn’t as strong as it once was. So. I’ve just ordered a copy of the Feynman Lectures on Physics and I’m also about to get some calculus worksheets printed out so I can keep the grey matter active. I do really miss it - the abstract notation, the abstraction needed to build physical theories, and the math!

The other interesting thing that’s happened over the past few weeks is me discovering a new sense of equanimity I didn’t know I had. Something happens, and I think to myself, “Ah, this happened, that’s cool” and just move on with life. As someone who typically is quite neurotic about most things, this is a welcome development and I plan and hope to keep it cultivated.

That’s it about me - I’ll leave you to the list of things to read! Tell me which one you loved best, or just tell me something fun or random about your life. You can always reach me by replying to my emails.

1. The controversial sweet that fuels Norwegians - BBC

“Kvikk Lunsj” is an iconic Norwegian chocolate bar, and it’s now synonymous with outdoor exploration. It’s much loved by Norwegians, particularly because it became part of the national reclamation of the outdoors post WW2. Why is it controversial, though? Because it’s almost an exact knock-off of Kit-Kat! And now that Kit-Kat is entering Norway, it’s actually not allowed to sell a four-fingered wafer, and has to sell a different “chunky” version instead.

2. How Kyoto Japan Became the World’s Loveliest Tourist-Trap - New York Magazine

I love the article’s subtitle: “A great exchange rate, ChatGPT, and kimono-wearing bros have turned Kyoto into the loveliest tourist trap on earth.”
There are 1.4 billion international travelers each year now, and the only country expected to see a smaller number of them in 2025 is the USA. It’s crazy.

3. A Tale of Sex and Intrigue in Imperial Kyoto - The Atlantic

Well, another Kyoto piece, but this one takes us back a thousand years to when Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji , often considered the world’s first ever novel. I’ve not read it, but this piece by Lauren Groff was very interesting - stitching together parts of the novel, comparing it to modern story structures, and analyzing what the novel has to say about the society itself at that point in time.

The reader of any text provides half of its meaning. To me, an American woman in the early 21st century, prickly and free-spirited Lady Murasaki now appears to have been chafing under conformist pressures in the Heian court. I read her radical evocations of characters’ internal states as though they are eruptions of the author’s own rebellious soul. Perhaps this subversive interpretation is wish fulfillment on my part. But Kyoto itself seemed to agree with it. […] This is a place where Lady Murasaki’s work has never disappeared, yet also has never ceased to take on new shapes and transform to fit the current moment.

4. Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People - Ribbonfarm

I’m not sure how I came across this 2014 piece by Venkatesh Rao, but it’s an interesting one. It starts off with the simple premise that “surround yourself with smarter people” doesn’t make sense as an optimal strategy, because it means that the smarter people around you are next to someone less smart. Instead, Rao says that you should surround yourself with people who are as different from you as possible, and who can inject surprise into your life when you talk to them. The people who can inject surprise most frequently are the best, and the nice thing about this framing is that it can be reciprocal too. The essay then goes into a whole discussion about finite and infinite games, which I honestly didn’t care much for, but the first part and its framing is quite a nice mental framework to have.

5. Is AI a bubble? - Exponential View

Nice piece by Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren on how to quantitatively tell whether or not we are in an AI bubble. It talks about five gauges to use to diagnose bubbles historically, and analyzes where we are today. Basically, sanity checks like “is AI investment significant enough to be bending the entire economy?”, “what’s the quality of the money funding this capex?” and such. I’ll give you their answer: they think that we’re not in a bubble. However, I’ll also add that there is a clear subjective unease among people, I feel, that AI isn’t really adding value to stuff. Sure, people are spending money on it, and that might be FOMO-driven, but what’s the real value?

6. Ben Kweller Is Playing Through the Pain - Texas Monthly

Oh dear, this made me sob on a flight. I didn’t know about Ben Kweller before reading this - he’s an American musician who’s popular in the alt rock circles. His son, Dorian, was just starting to write and release his own music, and father and son were supposed to do a tour together. Tragically, Dorian passed away in an accident (he was just 16), but Ben continued the tour as a tribute to him. Heart-rending.

7. Breaking Points - Harpers

Really nice and evocative essay by Agnes Callard about friendships and breakups. She focuses in particular on the act of consent in the concept of breaking someone off -

You can’t waltz by yourself. When I lose you, I also lose the me I became for you. And vice versa. Which is why cutting you off, once we have grown together, is an act of violence. I am not cutting anything visible, like your arm or leg, but I am nonetheless cutting away something that is a part of you—me. This is an act of psychological violence.

8. The Great Forgetting - Nautilus

Summer Praetorius writes about two things and tries to tie them together: (a) her brother’s concussion and subsequent loss of memory and descent into schizophrenia, and (b) the loss of historical knowledge and context as old geological-timescale actions are reversed by rapid human activity. It’s an interesting essay; I can’t say I’m a huge fan of combining the personal and the scientific, but it’s done well in this essay.

Everywhere on Earth, amnesia is smoldering. Ash from our most ancient libraries is raining down on us, lofted into toxic smoke that circles the globe, darkening glaciers that accelerate their melting, sending thousands of years of history pouring into the ocean, where it steadily rises up to erode the banks of our futures. Those who can’t shake the shivers of ill ease are the ones who have always sought wisdom from the past, and suddenly there is an eerie silence—stumps of history, no longer talking back.

Social media is being pretty aggressively tested right now - with eroding social fabric, addiction fueled by heavy algorithmic engineering, and not least, synthetic content powered by better and better AI. What happens when we cross the tipping point and it just becomes machines talking to each other? James Sullivan’s theory is that we will move back to invite-only curated communities - Patreons, group chats, maybe even some sort of Kat’s Kable community. It’s an optimistic vision, and I do hope we get there.

10. CATL: The Missed Empire and the Playbook for the Next Industrial VC - Maggie Xiao’s website

There’s a lot of ongoing discourse on the re-industrialization of societies who have outsourced a lot of their engineering expertise to China and other parts of the East. This piece goes into a lot of that - what do you need to build engineering expertise, what’s wrong in the way western investors approach business models exciting to them, and why it’s important to simply get going and worry about the fancier stuff later.

Kat's Kable #358