Hello there, and welcome to a Wednesday morning issue of the Kable. This time I’m not making up for a weekend no-show, but rather showing up with a bonus B-side issue! I’ve been reading a lot over the past few months, and every Kable curation starts with me having ~40 pieces to pick from. I now have enough of what I feel wouldn’t make it to the main Kable, but is still nice - hence this quick list!
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Cognitive Ergonomics — Blundercheck
Nice read on how we should be designing AI systems to make them “ergononomic” for us as users. If you missed it, Systems Thinking is Brain Rot for Analysts, also from Blundercheck, is amazing. -
Trust, Technology and the CTO — Rhea Karuturi on Medium
I went to a Claude Code meetup by Rhea sometime back, and I then stumbled upon this piece by her on the role of a CTO - enjoyed and also food for thought. -
We Don’t Sell Saddles Here — Stewart Butterfield on Medium
This is a really nice essay by the CEO of Slack. It’s actually an internal memo - about what they’re building and how to get people to use it. -
Choose Good Quests — Founders Fund
“Today, Silicon Valley faces a crisis of nonsense. With no shortage of problems, and no shortage of both young technologists and well-capitalized former founders capable of solving them, our best and brightest have largely lost themselves to easy money, the attention grind, and early retirement. In tech especially, for all of the industry’s rare potential, such abdication of responsibility does not only constitute a failure of progress, but a moral failure.” -
It’s Possible to Learn in Our Sleep. Should We? — The New Yorker
Self-explanatory :P. -
The Emergent Self Loop — The Technium
Kevin Kelly on AI.It is entirely possible we come to create a third category for this kind of consciousness and intelligence and selves, that are neither “real”, nor a fake in the mirror. Rather they are what Jean Baudrillard called the hyperreal. An imitation, a reflection, so good that it has its own reality.
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Letters to Mothers: Crones, Hags, Witches, and Killjoys — Guernica
“Mother’s Day is a joke we are all in on, and yet it continues—straight-faced, deadly serious, and poisoned.” -
The Two Faces of Lummie Jenkins — The Atavist Magazine
Phew! What an intense piece. “The people of Wilcox County, Alabama, remember the longtime sheriff as a god or a monster—it just depends on who you ask.”
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A Family Adventure Across 3,000 Miles of Texas — Texas Highways
Really entertaining personal account of a four-person family roadtrip! Lovely travel accounts and pictures too. -
Will You Still Medal in the Morning — ESPN
Very funny essay about flings and affairs between Olympians during the Olympics. There’s almost a sense of secretly learning about something you shouldn’t, in this article. -
The Neural Network Zoo — Asimov Institute
2016 (can you believe it???) exploration of what different artificial neural networks look like. And of course, the transformer architecture that underpins modern LLMs is there too. -
What I Learned About Relationships After Being With My Wife for 8 Years — Absurd Pirate
Lovely introspection on eight years of being married. -
Tom Hiddleston on Taylor Swift, Heartbreak, and that Tank Top — GQ
I did not expect to enjoy this Tom Hiddleston profile as much as I did.“Perhaps you learned his name only because of his recent three-month romance with Taylor Swift. But by then, Tom Hiddleston was already a beloved Marvel villain, James Bond short-lister, Night Manager leading man, and truly gifted wearer of suits (like the ones he‘s got on here, in this season’s color: brown). Taffy Brodesser-Akner heads to London to absorb the full blast of his English charm offensive—and find out why Tom and Taylor wound up on the rocks so Hiddleswiftly.”
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Fruit Is Too Sweet — The Atlantic
So true, especially in the US :( -
Meet the Texans Who Love (Like Really Love) Their Snails — Texas Monthly
I feel if the Kable had a type, it would be essays about passionate people in specific niches, and passionately written essays about them. This is one such.