Hello there, reader, and welcome to another issue of Kat’s Kable. As always, ten great things to read. I’m pretty hungry now, so I’m gonna go grab breakfast. Enjoy your reading, okay? And tell me if you do (or don’t)!
1. 2025 letter - Zhengdong Wang’s website
Well, well, if you haven’t yet read Wang’s 2025 AI (and life) letter, what are you waiting for? This is the thesis for the AI part of the letter:
By now, anyone who can be convinced that AI will be a big deal by being shown a graph has already been shown that graph and is on board. So let me try a different approach. I will tell you the story of how I came to believe in the compute theory of everything.
I also liked this:
The biggest mistake people make when they make the case for AI is that they say it’s different this time. It’s not different this time because it’s always been different. There hasn’t been any constant normal trend ever, and all we’ve ever done is be optimistic that we’ll muddle through. Nothing is truly inevitable, certainly not progress. And progress, too, might stop tomorrow. All things considered, though, it would be stranger if it did than if it didn’t. I don’t want to have that hesitation, anyway.
2. Reflections on 2025 - Samuel Albanie’s Substack
This pairs nicely with the previous piece, since it’s also a 2025 reflection, about AI and centred around the “compute theory of everything”.
I have come to believe that every engineer must walk the road to Damascus in their own time. One does not simply adopt the Compute Theory of Everything by hearing others discuss it. You have to be viscerally shocked by the pyrotechnics of scale in a domain you know too well to be easily impressed.
3. Inside the Tent on “The Great British Bake Off” - The New Yorker
Delightful essay about the Great British Bake Off. It’s written by Ruby Tandoh, who was runner-up in the 2013 edition and has since gone on to become a baker and food writer. It’s super fun and what was pretty noteworthy to me was the sheer advancement in baking that the show showcases as compared to previous food shows.
That the show is a food-star factory is not exactly in the spirit of the bake-offs that inspired it, which were vicious routs among just-above-average home bakers, for almost no measurable reward. Have you ever made Albina Flieller’s Quick Crescent Pecan Pie Bar, which made her a co-winner of the 1973 Pillsbury Bake Off? Of course you haven’t. Even the best carrot cake at the village show is only the best carrot cake at the village show. The succor of small-time hubris is what good bake-offs are about—bakers driven only by that elegant, unimpeachable motive, to be the best.
4. The Math of Why You Can’t Focus at Work - Can Duruk’s website “Off by One”
This was fun. A gripe I have with work is that it’s full of interruptions. Duruk says, yes, this is a problem, so let’s model a workday as a Poisson process (a type of statistical modeling for when you get interrupted) and study ways of actually getting blocks of work done. There are three parameters he considers: lambda (number of interruptions per hour), delta (minutes needed to regain focus after an interruption) and theta (minimum block size for meaningful work). It’s a useful framing and I’d recommend it just to get a sense of how hard it is to create blocks for focused work unless you really try hard to make it happen.
5. How a simple question about American hotels led to ‘the greatest immigration story never told’ - CNN
This is another fun piece about the movie “The Patel Motel Story”, which premiered in June 2025. It’s about how broadly, Indians immigrants control over 60% of US motels and hotels, and in particular how the Patel surname is the most common one among them. The story of how they started off with leasing hotels is pretty cool.
6. Why India doesn’t export Milk? - Abhed Manocha’s Substack
I liked this deep dive into India’s milk value chains, strongly influenced by farmer cooperatives, and how despite India’s clear leadership in milk production (almost 20% higher than all of Europe and over double of the 3rd placed US), it exports very little (not even in top 10 milk exporters). This is because Indians love milk and consume a lot domestically, India’s fragmented producer ecosystem, and the fact that for many farmers, milk production is a way to hedge against crop risks and not an activity to maximize profits on.
7. Conversations with a Hit Man - Atavist Magazine
I read this on a flight this past week. It took me about 40 minutes, but it was worth it. So good!
“A former FBI agent traveled to Louisiana to ask a hired killer about a murder that haunted him. Then they started talking about a different case altogether.”
8. On the Hunt for Nightcrawlers in the Worm-Picking Capital of the World - The Local
This was so cool too! Nightcrawler worms are the most commonly used bait worms by fishers, and they resist being grown in captivity. So worm “farmers” have to lease out farming land that’s been left fallow, get an army of pickers to work overnight when it’s overcast, and then ship those worms. It’s a bit.. weird to be talking about worms this way, but very fascinating nonetheless.
9. Protectors of Aqviqtuuq - Canadian Geographic
“The northern tip of mainland Canada is a paradise of caribou, polar bears and Arctic char as yet undisturbed by mining. The residents of Taloyoak, Nunavut, are fighting to keep it that way.”
10. The Luminous Particular - Poetry Foundation
I’d shared The Third Thing in issue #366 - Donald Hall talking about his marriage to the poet Jane Kenyon. This piece, a review (I’d say a review++) of the 2023 biography Jane Kenyon: The Making of a Poet , “frees the poet from the shadow of her famous older husband.”