Hello there, reader, and welcome to another issue of Kat’s Kable - your favourite internet newsletter. As always, ten great things to read. This should reach you at 8am on a Sunday morning in India - my favourite time. I’m writing this out on Saturday, though - and traveling for a short trip on Sunday. The trip is special because I’m meeting one of my best friends visiting India briefly, and also because it’s a trip without my laptop. I love those trips!
I’m off now to go eat some ice cream - much needed in this year’s Bangalore heat. Enjoy your reading, and as always, just reply to this email to tell me anything - that you love this newsletter (duh), something that you’d like to share, or maybe something that I should focus more on in issues to come.
1 Bread of Beirut Granta I really enjoyed this 2012 piece by Annia Ciezadlo. It’s about the furns of Beirut, communal bread ovens shared by many to bake their daily bread. A mainstay of historical Lebanon, these ovens decreased in popularity of late only to have a resurgence due to the shortages caused by the Lebanese civil war. I really enjoyed Ciezadlo’s reporting of her interactions with the local people - their mana’eesh (pizza-like pies), man’oushi and how the bakers are the ones who organize community around them, share news, and act as a miscellaneous glue in the social fabric.
2 From ‘kagaz’ to ‘naan’: How Persian became the ‘English of the era’ and wove itself into India’s cultural DNA Indian Express A fun read: “Persian has deeply influenced India’s language and literature for centuries, and everyday speech, shaping administration, poetry, and vocabulary in Hindi, Urdu, and regional cultures.”
I learnt a lot of fun historical facts about Indian culture and administration in this essay.
3 Don’t Get Distracted Caleb Thompson’s blog Superb read - Thompson talks about working on software projects that have the capability to do harm: to put it simply, in parts of his career, he worked on clever software that made finding and killing people more effective. He says: don’t get distracted by the intellectual satisfaction or the organizational structure of your team - pay attention to the final aims.
4 The Patriot: Shyam Sankar of Palantir Colossus Well, for better or worse, this is a good successor to the previous piece. All of us have… well, views on Palantir - it’s a great data science company, it’s a pioneer, it helps defense and military agencies operate better and thus get better at surveillance and violence, etc. This piece, though, is a profile of Shyam Sankar - the CTO at Palantir who, according to many at the company, is responsible for the company being where it is and for pioneering its unique “forward-deployed engineer” model. I felt uneasy reading this piece, for multiple reasons, and also found it illuminating.
5 How Markdown took over the world Anil Dash I last shared The Web We Lost by Anil Dash in issue #375 - that was a piece back from 2012! Now I come to you with a piece by him from earlier this year on how the markdown file format has become super ubiquitous right now. Enjoyable read, mostly because it’s a historical chronicle of the concept -> idea -> open-source bedrock journey.
The people who make the real Internet and the real innovations also don’t look for ways to hurt the world around them, or the people around them. Sometimes, as in the case of Aaron, the world hurts them more than anyone should ever have to bear. I know not everybody cares that much about plain text files on the Internet; I will readily admit I am a huge nerd about this stuff in a way that most normal people are not. But I do think everybody cares about some part of the wonderful stuff on the Internet in this way, and I want to fight to make sure that everybody can understand that it’s not just five terrible tycoons who built this shit. Real people did. Good people. I saw them do it.
6 One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment Maggie Appleton’s website I really, really enjoy Maggie Appleton’s work - A Short History of Bi-Directional Links (issue #266), Folk Interfaces (issue #291), The Dark Forest and Generative AI (issue #328) and Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks (issue #358). So, yeah! No brainer to share her latest piece about collaborative coding both with your team and your AI agents and your team’s AI agents.
7 Kanchipuram Saris & Thinking Machines Alter Magazine Oof. This is so good. The text, but also the visuals (please read this on your laptop or bigger screen).
“Can a neural network, microbes and blockchain save a thousand-year-old loom from extinction?”
On another note, this is a piece where my vibe-coded “similar articles extension” shines. See what it’s thrown up: The Embroidered Computer (issue #155) and The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make (issue #238).
8 How Will the Miracle Happen Today? Kevin Kelly’s website I loved this.
When I was in my twenties I would hitchhike to work every day. I’d walk down three blocks to Route 22 in New Jersey, stick out my thumb and wait for a ride to work. Someone always picked me up. I had to punch-in for my job as a packer at a warehouse at 8 o’clock sharp, and I can’t remember ever being late. It never ceased to amaze me even then, that the kindness of strangers could be so dependable. Each day I counted on the service of ordinary commuters who had lives full of their own worries, and yet without fail, at least one of them would do something kind, as if on schedule. As I stood there with my thumb outstretched, the question in my mind was simply: “How will the miracle happen today?”
9 Teaching when to trust New Humanist This is nice - it talks about the Finns approach to critical thinking and how to identify and deal with misinformation in the digital age.
But perhaps most importantly, Finland has privileged early intervention, through focusing on its schools. Media education in Finland begins as early as primary school, with media and science literacy integrated into the curriculum. Students learn how to spot deception across subjects: in maths, they see how statistics can be manipulated; in art, they explore how images can convey misleading messages; in history, they study famous propaganda campaigns; and in Finnish, they examine the many ways in which words can be used to confuse or mislead. Training in scepticism and the development of critical thinking skills are not seen as purely academic matters, but as essential to daily life.
10 Let a thousand societies bloom Vitalik Buterin’s website Fun exploration of a concept - the countries as we have them right now will continue to exist, but two new groups of entities will emerge (and you could say, continue to emerge) - “zones” and “tribes”. Tribes focus on the people and the culture. Zones focus on innovating on rules (regulations, laws, etc.).
“One of the recurring ideological themes of the last few decades has been the idea of creating entire new communities, cultures, cities and even countries. Instead of having a fixed number of these, all slowly changing, we can “let a thousand nations bloom” (where “nation” can cover the full spectrum from a glorified internet forum to a literal country), giving people more choice and opening up space for more pluralistic independent innovation. Instead of your membership in one being an accident of birth, each person can choose to gravitate to the communities that best fit their values.”