Hello! Welcome to another issue of Kat’s Kable. I have so much to say today. First, I had a pretty big milestone at work this past week, and that’s gotten me feeling pretty happy. My work tends to be very lumpy, with nothing happening for weeks, or even months, and then significant things unfold pretty fast. So when one of those things happen, it feels a little unsettling - weeks of effort have ended up getting to where we want to be, but also me and the entire organization being so busy that we don’t really have time to mark the moment.
The other thing! I’m so excited about this. I vibe-coded a plugin for my Kat’s Kable flow! I got vector embeddings done on all past issues of the Kable, so the big blobs of text are converted into easy-to-compare chunks, and now my plugin pulls up similar pieces from past issues when I’m writing the current issue. See this screenshot below (I manage my markdown files in Obsidian). I have so many thoughts and ideas for new features, and this is genuinely very exciting.
Anyhow.. should hopefully translate to a better reading experience for you, but at the very least, a very fun Saturday evening was had.
1. The Institute Behind Taiwan’s Chip Dominance - Asterisk Magazine
Detailed essay about Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and how it was responsible for taking Taiwan’s low-value electronics outsourced assembly industry in the 1970s and upgrading it to the behemoth we know today (TSMC is an ITRI spin-off). Lots of interesting insights: (a) get industry buy-in and avoid alienating incumbents by developing talent pool and industry-ready tech to increase their margins, (b) focus on spinning companies off and getting incumbents to invest and own equity, (c) suffer from their own success in the 90s after they became competitive with the very corporate R&D they seeded.
2. Between the sheets at the college Excel championships - Washington Post
“One of the most unusual — and fun — events in college sports is a high-stakes spreadsheeting competition in Las Vegas.”
3 & 4
How can romantic love last a lifetime & Russia against the Western way of love- Aeon Essays
Two contemplative essays on the emergence and development of love. The first one talks about romantic ideology - about how some studies show that romantic love and sexual desire decrease over time, but the author Aaron Ben-Ze’ev tries to argue against it.
For love to be profound, the partners’ personal characteristics do not have to be the best in town – they just need to be in harmony. When the fit is there, passion can be fanned by profundity instead of intensity so that the romance endures.
The second talks about different approaches to love, and and in particular the act of falling in love. The premise:
“Love in the West is consumerist – we choose a partner to give us what we think we need. But Russians do things differently.”
It then moves on to an interesting point - in Russian culture and literature, love is something that happens to you - you just fall headlong into it - this is called the Regime of Fate vs. the western Regime of Choice.
5. Ending Well - Places Journal
“In the birthplace of Ghana’s cocoa industry, neighbors negotiate the expansion of a harvest path — and with it, an alternative model for development in the populous West African nation.”
I began to see this path as emblematic of the history of the land I hold, and equally central to the land’s future. For me to do anything or build anything on the land would require a movement of materials or people along this path. As social anthropologist Polly Hill has written, the harvest path is a peculiar symbol. It enables the aims of the capitalist-farmer, even as it goes against the logic of capitalistic land distribution in which all land is privatized. The path to the land I hold passes through seven different parcels of private property owned by seven different people. I began to imagine what it would look like to decolonize the architectural epistemology of the harvest path for a pluriverse future.
6. Two Hundred Years of Surgery - New England Journal of Medicine
2012 piece by Atul Gawande, and of course, when you see his name as author - you know you need to read the piece. This is a very instructive history of how surgery has evolved in the 200 years of existence of the New England Journal of Medicine (1812-2012). Some parts of it are gory, and I will admit I skimmed over them quickly, but overall I feel you can’t help but feel amazed to be living in the current century than any time earlier, at least from a surgery perspective.
7. Adjika: Sauce of Glory, Pride of Abkhazia - Roads and Kingdoms
Another very fun 2012 piece - someone I follow on Instagram literally just posted about Adjika sauce a couple of weeks ago, and I found it serendipitous to stumble across this essay shortly after. It’s so good! Adjika sauce is the national condiment of the Abkhazia region (a territory that recently broke off from Georgia).
“You can use adjika for everything: if you put it on a chicken, a proper chicken, not a frozen one, if you put it on a chicken then you will be with your wife as if you had just met yesterday,” he said, with a laugh and flick of the eyebrows.
“It is like the diamond of Abkhazian cuisine, because all our sauces, made from walnuts or from whatever, they all must be made with adjika, it gives the piquancy that makes you want to eat them.”
8. Now That Books Mean Nothing - The Morning News
“When you’ve long been identified as a “literary type,” how can it be that receiving books as get-well gifts leaves you feeling empty, angry, and determined to chug YouTube straight?”
These are piled on the wooden desk that serves as my makeshift bedside table and which, 60-odd years ago, belonged to my mother when she was a schoolgirl in Wells, Maine. It’s as if these books are keeping vigil, as if they understand it’s not them, it’s me, and that the four of us are waiting together like family for the moment when I am able to reach over, pick one with purpose or at random, open it and commit to finishing what I have started without stopping to fret about how to make it through.
9. Outsourcing thinking - Erik Johannes’ blog
Very interesting post thinking through the effects of outsourcing thinking to LLMs. One school of thought challenges the thought that “there is a fixed amount of thinking to do”. If you follow that thought, there’s only so much for humans to think, if some of that is outsourced, then humans do less thinking overall. Erik, agrees with this point in a nuanced way - humans are never going to run out of things to think about , but it’s important that we continue to think about something , and this is super important in the age of LLMs.
Comparing with the “lump of labour” fallacy again: While it may be true that outsourcing physical work to machines will simply create new types of work to do, it doesn’t mean that the new work is useful, fulfilling, or beneficial for individuals and society. The same goes for thinking. We must acknowledge that all kinds of thinking have an effect on us, even the boring and tedious kinds. Removing the need for some cognitive tasks can have just as much influence, positive or negative, as taking up new types of cognitive tasks.
10. Classical Music Critic Justin Davidson Learns How to Conduct - New York Magazine
Superb! This essay is alternatively titled, “What Does a Conductor Do?”. If you, like me, have always wondered about this critical question in classical music, this essay is for you. It’s an absolute delight.
As I get deeper into the score, I focus on one crucial but difficult aspect of the job: preparing a moment before it arrives. Gilbert urges his students to stop living in the moment; giving a Get ready! cue just one beat ahead of a Now! creates a little shiver of panic. A conductor has to be simultaneously ahead of the music and with it, experiencing and expecting at the same time—manufacturing an extended déjà vu. When Gilbert works, you can see the pulse thrumming through his body, diggadiggadiggadigga, yet he also projects a commanding serenity. He crooks a finger at the timpanist to alert him of an impending event, flicks it a beat before the entrance, and then drops it in exactly the slot where it belongs. The musicians find the ease and clarity of these minimal motions reassuring. A good conductor is a parent who’s always ready and always right.