Hello there, reader. This edition of Kat’s Kable has been minted by a new member of the 30s club. It’s honestly a nice place to be - I’ve had a great birthday weekend. Company, love, food, rest. What more can one want. Well, I suppose, more sleep never hurts. So I’ll keep this short and let you read then ten great things I have for you this week.
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1. Where the Dogs Run (The New York Review of Books):
Really fun read about the salmon and sled dog dynamics in the basin of and along the Yukon river. Really transports you there.
2. Your Face Tomorrow (Harpers):
I thought this would be a generic introspection on the changing face (ha!) of facial recognition, but it goes into quite some nuance.
3. Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? (The Guardian):
I’ve been in a whole bunch of discussions this week about how using ChatGPT etc. makes people (and especially children) stupid - because we don’t write from scratch, don’t think from scratch, and so on. And yeah, I’m sure everyone’s thought about this to some extent or the other.
4. 192 Weeks (Eric Zhang’s blog):
Eric writes really nicely about the almost four years (192 weeks) he spent at his first job, where he was founding engineer at Modal. I loved the combination of personal, team and professional insights.
5. When is better to think without words? (Henrik Karlsson’s Substack):
I see a Henrick Karlsson post - I read it. I’m a simple man. This is actually a really fun meditation on how mathematicians do a lot of their thinking without words, and of course without writing. Lots of cool insights. (1) why use words when you can’t express the concepts in them? and (2) writing things down has an element of finality to it, so wordless thinking feels more informal and low-stakes.
6. The irresistible mystery of the beautiful batsman (Financial Times):
If you like cricket, this is really fun. And it’s by Samanth Subramanian, so another of those I’m-a-simple-man reads.
7. Capital Intensity Isn’t Bad (Not Boring):
Fun! I read this for work, mostly, but I found it interesting overall. When we talk about science-based startups or companies building hardware, then we never think of their capital or financial engineering as their moat - this article says that not enough of them pursue the alchemy of asset-backed securities.
8. The Pursuit of Life Where It Seems Unimaginable (Quanta Magazine):
“A decade ago, Karen Lloyd discovered single-celled microbes living beneath the seafloor. Now she studies how they can survive in Earth’s crust, possibly for hundreds or thousands of years, and push life’s limits of time and energy.”
9. Radios, how do they work? (lcamtuf’s Substack):
Well, didn’t this bring back memories of things I (ought to) remember from undergrad physics.
“A brief introduction to antennas, superheterodyne receivers, and signal modulation schemes.”
10. How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World (The New Yorker):
This one is a project, took me an hour+ to get through. I didn’t actually know how Gagosian was - so here’s a short summary: he’s the world’s leading art leader, almost-billionaire, and is one of the most amazing salespeople ever, working 24/7.