Hello there, reader, and welcome back to another issue of the Kable. I don’t have too much to say this time. I lost a friend over the weekend, and while I may write about it some time, I’d like to share On remembering and honouring memory of loss, which I wrote back in 2022.

1. The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change (Henrik Karlsson):

Lovely article, as expected now from Karlsson, about meeting his wife Johanna. It’s a prequel, written only now though, to two other essays of his on the same topic.

2. A Most Important Mustard (Asimov Press):

Arabidopsis thaliana , a wild mustard, I’ve learned is the premier model for plant biology. Super interesting story into its co-history with humans.

3. AI’s real superpower: consuming, not creating (Mike San Román’s website):

Not a longform read, but an interesting concept. I’ve not been very good at using LLMs in my work, and partly it’s coming from a sense of luddite- and prudishness, almost. But at the same time this essay points me to the fact that current AI models aren’t great at generating stuff (you can easily tell when something is AI-generated), but they are great at ingesting lots of stuff and combining different parts of it.

4. Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. (Taranis):

Interesting counterpoint to a lot of public discourse these days on why putting GPUs in orbit is the next natural thing to do (cheap power). The funny thing is that despite space being cold, managing heat is terribly hard. You can’t convect heat away. You have to conduct and then radiate.

5. Building AI Products In The Probabilistic Era (Gian Segato’s blog):

The shift is real, and it affects every part of the tech industry, altering how we make products, how we study and design them, and how we structure work around them. Organizations that build using an empirical approach, think in probabilities, and measure complex trajectories will define the next era of technology. The rest will keep trying to squeeze wave functions into spreadsheets, wondering why their perfectly deterministic dashboards can’t capture what makes their products magical.

6. Does It Help to Know History? (The New Yorker):

2014 piece by Alan Gopnik that I don’t know how I stumbled upon now, but definitely worth a read.

The real sin that the absence of a historical sense encourages is presentism, in the sense of exaggerating our present problems out of all proportion to those that have previously existed. It lies in believing that things are much worse than they have ever been—and, thus, than they really are—or are uniquely threatening rather than familiarly difficult. […]
What history actually shows is that nothing works out as planned, and that everything has unintentional consequences. History doesn’t show that we should never go to war—sometimes there’s no better alternative. But it does show that the results are entirely uncontrollable, and that we are far more likely to be made by history than to make it. History is past, and singular, and the same year never comes round twice.

7. A Dutch Architect’s vision of cities that float on water (The New Yorker via Waterstudio):

Absolutely lovely piece by Kyle Chaka. It’s a profile of Koen Olthuis, a Dutch architect pioneering building structures on water.

8. How J.R.R. Tolkien Came to Write the Stories of ‘The Rings of Power’ (Smithsonian Magazine):

Samira shared this essay with me after we watched LOTR (her first time!) and it’s really nice. Historical inspirations behind Númenor.

9. The Left Arm of God: Sandy Koufax was more than just a perfect pitcher (Sports Illustrated):

In case you haven’t read The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch (issue #366), read that fast! And that’s what got me to this profile of Sandy Koufax, a “real” player.. I didn’t realize Koufax was that good.. and that enigmatic. The pictures towards the end are also awesome.

10. How I Became the Honest Broker (The Honest Broker):

I mentioned in issue #347 (when I shared The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass) that I wanted to go back to Ted Gioia’s first Substack post. Finally got around to it. It’s really nice.

Even so, I saw my approach to writing change over the next few months. Without even consciously admitting it to myself, I was taking on the persona of the Honest Broker. I began measuring my own methodologies against ideal standards of fairness, and nagging myself when I strayed from them. I started paring away at exaggerations and posturing in my prose, and worked to find other ways of imparting color and vitality to my sentences. Above all, I started worrying about my reader—because, after all, wasn’t the reader the real person I was supposed to serve? Wasn’t the reader the beneficiary of my brokerage services?