Rest of What I Know - New pages [en-us]

Blog/2026-08-18/Watermark Yourself

2026-08-19T05:52:58Z

Roshan: Wikipen

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_Stylometer.jpg}}|thumb|Moderators sound like moderators]]
Recently there was a big hullaballoo about the fact that Claude is watermarking their generated text. John Gruber called it a 'perversion of writing':

{{Quote
|text=My error was believing Anthropic that their system wouldn’t adulterate and corrupt the semantics of the text their models generate. That is in fact exactly what they plan to do.
|source=Daring Fireball, John Gruber<ref name=daringfireball.net/>
}}

Anthropic themselves claim that the watermark is imperceptible and that you won't be able to detect it.

{{Quote
|text=When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.
|source=Claude Support<ref name=claude-fp/>
}}

Back in the day, there was a website that would identify people's writing style and suggest other users who write just like them. There aren't that many HN users with over 2000 words and 50 comments and these days experimenting with something like that is fairly easy so I thought I'd give it a shot.

The idea is quite trivial: take 2/3/4-char-grams across all users that have 2000 words, and 50 comments, strip out quoted-text and code-blocks (people use either for quotes), and weight them according to [[wikipedia:tf–idf]]. Then I just precomputed the results for everyone and stuck them in a SQLite database and [https://stylometer.roshangeorge.dev/ you can now query HN users by style for fun].

{{#seo:|description=Compare Hacker News writing styles with this stylometer tool, built after Claude's watermark debate. Find users who write like you.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:AI]]
[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Tools]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]

== Notes ==
<references>
<ref name="daringfireball.net">{{cite web|title=Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing|website=Daring Fireball|url=https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writing|language=en|access-date=2026-08-17}}</ref>
<ref name="claude-fp">{{cite web|title=How Claude marks AI-generated content {{!}} Claude Help Center|website=support.claude.com|date=2026-08-10|url=https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content|language=en|access-date=2026-08-17}}</ref>
</references>

Praxis Requires Bad Faith

2026-08-06T20:07:44Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

Most people have a variety of objectives, proximate and ultimate, and a variety of virtues. The virtues are how one represents themselves to be predictable and trustworthy to others, which are how they are able to form coalitions. Crucially, though, these techniques for coalition-building differ in their relationship to in-groups and out-groups.

{{Quote
|original=叶公语孔子曰吾党有直躬者其父攘羊而子证之孔子曰吾党之直者异于是父为子隐子为父隐直在其中矣
|text=The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is an upright man named Gong. When his father stole a sheep, the son testified against him.”

Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who are upright act differently: fathers conceal the wrongdoing of their sons, and sons conceal the wrongdoing of their fathers. Uprightness lies within this.”
|source=The Analects of Confucius, 13.18<ref name=confucius/>
}}

Truth and facts do not have to be used to reach a consensus point on one's objectives. Some people prefer to depict facts and then describe how one's objectives match other people's objectives and then you land on the position weighted by political power and impact. But an approach that dominates this is one that relies on misrepresenting reality and [[Outrage is the Universal Parasite | whipping people up into groups]].

One temporally local example is:

== Effective Altruists + The People ==

=== Background ===

[[wikipedia:Effective altruism]] is the movement associated with the idea that if you want to do good in the world, it's useful to measure how much good you're doing and then attempt to maximize it per unit effort. A commendable idea, and I subscribe to the idea itself. One subsect of the movement involves the idea that since the future has a potentially large number of humans, and future lives are not discountable in any way corresponding to present lives, then the most effective actions one can take in the EA sense are to ensure the existence of those humans. One subsect of this group then believes that avoiding world-ender tech, harbingers<ref name=tltl/>, is the more crucial use of effort per unit time.

[[wikipedia:People's republic|The People]] is shorthand for generally Leftist ideas and the [[wikipedia:Degrowth|degrowth]] movement<ref name=degrowth-left/>. The American Left movement is focused on preserving present jobs, opposing new technology, and state redistribution and the degrowth movement is a reactionary movement aiming to return to a pastoral past, or at least a reduction in our present use of resources and a return to a time of lower resource use.

=== The AI intersection ===

Artificial General Intelligence is generally-understood to be a harbinger<ref name=tltl/>. Both its proponents and its opponents<ref name=ai-opponents/> overwhelmingly recognize that it will reshape our economies to some degree and that in the weak case it will transform employment and in the strong case it has the potential to end humanity. This is the [[wikipedia:Nuclear holocaust|Nuclear Holocaust]] scenario of the 21st Century. The contrast here lies in the difference in approaches from the two factions opposed to this possible holocaust.

==== AI 2040 ====

The EA-associated grey tribe faction have written up a plan for stopping the holocaust they envision called [https://ai-2040.com/ AI 2040]. Notably in that essay they argue for an international moratorium through cooperation<ref name=arms-control/>, a pause in training, and nuclear-weapons-standard anti-proliferation controls that prevent secret projects from taking off. This plan allows for sufficient time for aligned intelligences to dominate. The plan is honest about its takes but notably diverges from the rest of the anti-AI group in this way:

{{Quote
|text=We think the concerns around current AI water usage are largely overstated. See this article for more. That said, as will be apparent later in the scenario, we do think that the environmental impact of AI over the next decade or two will be enormous, and that unrestrained growth would literally boil the oceans.
|source=[https://ai-2040.com/footnotes?from=%2F%3Fchoices%3Dplan-a-root#footnote-16 AI 2040, Footnote 16]
}}

As of the year 2026, no one has taken AI 2040 seriously and neither the legislature nor the AI companies have changed their approaches to match its plan. Total research transparency isn't taken seriously, and most AI companies have anti-distill<ref name=anti-distill/> protections implemented successfully enough to block other providers from playing.

While the AI 2040 plan is aimed at the [[wikipedia:2028 United States presidential election|2028 Elections]] backloading most of the predictions, the lack of any interest from either the government or from industry does not signal a likelihood of success.

Regardless, the distinguishing aspect of this faction is that it is attempting to be clear about facts, about the sources of one's beliefs, and then attempting to convince people using those of some particular outcome that is assumed to be detrimental to them.

==== The People ====

The People have chosen a different plan and put it into place. They have leaned into the things that are their specialties: [[wikipedia:Protectionism]] and [[Environmentalism As A Means]]. An example of the protectionist angle comes from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez banning GPU sales to China and so on:

{{Quote
|text=...this bill will stop a global race to see which country is the first to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs, or the first to build an AI that destroys the planet. It accomplishes this by banning U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not have safeguards in place to guarantee AI is safe and effective, workers are protected and AI does not harm the environment.
|source=Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Announce AI Data Center Moratorium Act<ref name=bernie-aoc-anti-aidc/>
}}

Protectionism is best prosecuted through the legislative and executive branches. This prong of the people uses various such techniques to convince their counterparts in actual power to constrain other parties. Currently, this is somewhat ineffective. While the Biden Administration banned a lot of GPU sales, the Trump Administration has moved to allow H200 sales to China. However, throughout this entire endeavour, Chinese AI companies have simply used cloud GPUs, the rental of which is not currently export-controlled though this will likely change in the next few years with the passing of the Remote Access Security Act<ref name=rental-gpu-act/>.

[[Factional Colony Ecology|The ecology of factions]] is that of colony organisms, however, and The People have a secondary tool at use: that of populism. Populist techniques are highly effective at controlling AI advancement, and are probably the most successful of all plans presented by opponents. The foremost approach is through the propagation of the ideas of water consumption and power cost increases, though additional techniques involve allegations of low-frequency noise and the pollution from gas turbines.

One popular source for water use comparisons was Karen Hao's book ''Empire of AI'' which said:

{{Quote
|text=In other words, the data center could use more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population of Cerrillos, roughly eighty-eight thousand residents, over the course of a year.
|source=''Empire of AI'', pp. 288-289, Karen Hao as quoted by Andy Masley<ref name=am-eoa/>
}}

A correction was issued in later editions of the book due to this being a conclusion formed from a unit conversion error and no books were recalled. By this time it is quite well-documented that the water issue is essentially fake<ref name=am-wif/><ref name=usdc/> slopulism with, at best, small local effects<ref name=ieee-ai-water/>. However, this is the focal point for most populist opposition. And this is somewhat successful: Texas, of all states, will now require audits of all datacenter water usage<ref name=texas-gov-anti-ai/>. In the states that The People control, this is old-hat, since they've made moves already<ref name=ny-ai-dc/>.

Similar techniques from The People involve the strategy of opposing energy projects, both in clean sources like nuclear<ref name=mfp-dc/><ref name=foe-dc/><ref name=ewg-dc/> or geothermal (where environmentalists join [[wikipedia:Burning Man|fossil-fuel artists]] to use an environmentalist law<ref name=bm-sue/><ref name=fobr-sue/><ref name=bm-win/><ref name=bm-buy/>) and even in renewable sources like solar<ref name=sc-calico/><ref name=sc-gemini/>. Some even go so far as to oppose transmission lines<ref name=trans-tucker/><ref name=trans-mo/>. With these blockers in place, the strategy then shifts to pointing out that the remaining power sources like on-site gas turbines are high polluting, carbon intensive, and noisy - all three of which are true.

The revealed preference of most environmentalists is to accept expanded fossil fuel use in order to get some other objective. Decades of opposition to clean energy while expressing concern about the climate, effectively expanding the amount of natural gas and coal energy in the US, is incoherent unless seen through that lens. But the common element in all these things is fewer of anything built - homes, industry, and AI datacenters.

==== Result ====

What is notable here is what has worked concretely here aren't any of the nice-looking websites describing what plans one should follow to save the world. Instead, what has created immediate action is bad faith use of environmental law to oppose clean energy, populist outrage using incorrect water use numbers, and a general popularisation of factoids that are untrue.

==== Deniable Cooperation ====

Of course, it is entirely possible that this is more advanced [[Factional Colony Ecology]] and that the sub-factions of the Stop AI faction have merely speciated into those adapted for their niche. While populists reach for the mob, the EAs reach for the elite, and combined the outcome sways both sections of society towards their end. I think this is somewhat unlikely because of the fact that the EA subfaction attempts to specifically oppose primary objections of The People like the water use. One could argue for a motte and bailey style structure, but I think they are merely misled about what will create outcomes.

In this world, the EA faction are Sheists, acting honestly to the out-group. The People are Confucians with an external-facing marketing of the environment and an internal-facing clarity of anti-building. The latter are currently achieving far better outcomes than the former.

== Conclusion ==

A sufficiently advanced actor might use both Sheist and Confucian techniques to appeal to different audiences, concealing that both have the same objective. However, only the latter is essential to success.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=confucius>
ChatGPT Translation.
</ref>
<ref name=tltl>
The *Terra Ignota* series calls these world-ending devices 'harbingers'. Present-day meaning of the word is "he who heralds the oncoming" but it actually comes from the same root that gives us 'harbour' and is a war word referring to army quarters and then the guy who goes ahead to secure the army quarters. I like the word for this right now because it heralds our end if they come to be used and it has the ancient war meaning.
</ref>
<ref name=degrowth-left>
The degrowth movement is not Left either by membership or by thought, but it intersects heavily with Leftism.
</ref>
<ref name=ai-opponents>
This is not universal, but it is overwhelming. There are many who believe that the most likely outcome is a reconfiguration of our economy with widespread ramifications but without death and destruction on a large scale, even though there is a chance of doom. e.g. [[Blog/2025-10-11/There Is A Tide In The Affairs Of Men]]. Others think it's a flash in the pan like cryptocurrency.
</ref>
<ref name=arms-control>
This is a parallel to the way that nuclear weapons construction was constrained. Through arms control agreements, the US and USSR reduced the total number of weapons they needed since they no longer needed to outrace the other. Nuclear weapons had the unfortunate property that they do not provide an enhancement on one's own economy, a thing one is always trying to do. The right framework for visualizing this is likely carbon-control, not arms-control, but regardless AI 2040 et al. have chosen arms control as their guide stone.
</ref>
<ref name=bernie-aoc-anti-aidc>
{{cite web
|title=Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Announce AI Data Center Moratorium Act
|url=https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act/
|website=Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator for Vermont
|date=March 25, 2026
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=anti-distill>
One such provider, [https://yunwu.ai/ Yunwu AI] was forced to pull all Claude models shortly after Anthropic announced that they had told the US government they were facing a "distillation attack".
</ref>
<ref name=rental-gpu-act>
Remote Access Security Act (H.R. 2683, Senate companion S. 3519)
{{cite web
|last1=Kim
|first1=Janet K.
|last2=Stafford Powell
|first2=Alison J.
|last3=Linskens
|first3=Bruce J.
|last4=Lamy
|first4=Alexandre (Alex)
|title=US House Passes Remote Access Security Act
|url=https://sanctionsnews.bakermckenzie.com/us-house-passes-remote-access-security-act/
|website=Global Sanctions and Export Controls Blog
|publisher=Baker McKenzie
|date=January 14, 2026
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=texas-gov-anti-ai>
{{cite web
|title=Governor Abbott Directs Comprehensive Data Center Audit
|url=https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comprehensive-data-center-audit
|website=Office of the Texas Governor
|publisher=State of Texas
|date=August 3, 2026
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=am-eoa>
{{cite web
|last=Masley
|first=Andy
|title=Empire of AI is wildly misleading about AI water use
|url=https://www.andymasley.com/writing/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading/#a-massive-factual-error-hao-claims-a-data-center-would-use-4500x-as-much-of-a-citys-water-as-the-actual-value
|website=Andy Masley
|date=November 16, 2025
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=am-wif>
{{cite web
|last=Masley
|first=Andy
|title=The AI Water Issue Is Fake
|website=Andy Masley
|date=11 October 2025
|url=https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=usdc>
{{cite report
|last1=Shehabi |first1=Arman
|last2=Newkirk |first2=Alex
|last3=Smith |first3=Sarah J.
|last4=Hubbard |first4=Alex
|last5=Lei |first5=Nuoa
|last6=Siddik |first6=Md Abu Bakar
|last7=Holecek |first7=Billie
|last8=Koomey |first8=Jonathan
|last9=Masanet |first9=Eric
|last10=Sartor |first10=Dale
|title=2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report
|institution=Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
|year=2024
|doi=10.71468/P1WC7Q
|url=https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energy-usage-report
}}
</ref>
<ref name=ieee-ai-water>
{{cite magazine
|last1=Ren
|first1=Shaolei
|last2=Luers
|first2=Amy
|title=The Real Story on AI’s Water Use—and How to Tackle It
|magazine=IEEE Spectrum
|date=10 September 2025
|url=https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=ny-ai-dc>
{{cite press release
|title=First Statewide Moratorium on New Hyperscale Data Centers Launched by Governor Kathy Hochul
|publisher=Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
|date=14 July 2026
|url=https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/first-statewide-moratorium-new-hyperscale-data-centers-launched-governor-kathy-hochul
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=mfp-dc>
{{cite web
|title=Campaign to Stop Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant
|website=Mothers for Peace
|url=https://mothersforpeace.org/campaign-to-stop-diablo/
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=foe-dc>
{{cite press release
|title=Environmental Organizations Move to Intervene in Diablo Canyon Relicensing Process
|publisher=Friends of the Earth
|date=5 March 2024
|url=https://foe.org/news/diablo-canyon-relicensing/
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=ewg-dc>
{{cite press release
|title=Environmental groups blow the whistle on state/PG&E illegal scheme to keep Diablo Canyon operating past license expiration dates
|publisher=Environmental Working Group
|date=10 January 2023
|url=https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/2023/01/environmental-groups-blow-whistle-statepge-illegal-scheme-keep
|access-date=6 August 2026
}}
</ref>
<ref name=trans-tucker>
{{cite news
|last=Crawley
|first=Lydia
|title=Tucker County Joins Fight Against Valley North
|url=https://parsonsadvocate.com/news/pa-top-stories/headlines/tucker-county-joins-fight-against-valley-north/
|work=The Parsons Advocate
|date=2026-07-28
|access-date=2026-08-06
}}
</ref>
<ref name=trans-mo>
{{cite magazine
|last=Holtz
|first=Michael
|title=The Holdouts in the Quest for a Better Power Grid
|url=https://www.newyorker.com/news/dept-of-energy/the-holdouts-in-the-quest-for-a-better-power-grid
|magazine=The New Yorker
|date=2024-01-26
|access-date=2026-08-06
}}
</ref>

<ref name=bm-sue>{{cite web |title=Bureau of Land Management Sued Over Handling of Ormat's Geothermal Exploration Project |url=https://journal.burningman.org/2023/01/news/official-announcements/ormat-geothermal-part-4/ |website=Burning Man Journal |publisher=Burning Man Project |date=2023-01-10 |access-date=2026-08-06}}</ref>

<ref name=fobr-sue>{{cite web |title=Friends of Black Rock Join Suit to Address Geothermal Drilling Proposals in Gerlach |url=https://www.blackrockdesert.org/news-media/blog-post-title-one-3w243-h9pc3 |publisher=Friends of Black Rock–High Rock |access-date=2026-08-06}}</ref>

<ref name=bm-win>{{cite news |title=Battle won: Washoe commissioners revoke drilling permit at Gerlach geothermal site |url=https://renonr.com/2023/04/28/battle-won-washoe-commissioners-revoke-drilling-permit-at-gerlach-geothermal-site/ |work=Reno News & Review |date=2023-04-28 |access-date=2026-08-06}}</ref>

<ref name=bm-buy>{{cite news |title=Burning Man to buy back geothermal leases, drop BLM lawsuit |url=https://www.eenews.net/articles/burning-man-to-buy-back-geothermal-leases-drop-blm-lawsuit/ |work=E&E News |publisher=Politico |date=2024-10-11 |access-date=2026-08-06 |url-access=subscription}}</ref>

<ref name=sc-calico>
{{cite news
|last=Woody
|first=Todd
|title=Sierra Club, NRDC Sue Feds To Stop Big California Solar Power Project
|url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2012/03/27/sierra-club-nrdc-sue-feds-to-stop-big-california-solar-power-project/
|work=Forbes
|date=March 27, 2012
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>

<ref name=sc-gemini>{{cite news
|last=Carlton
|first=Jim
|title=Solar Power’s Land Grab Hits a Snag: Environmentalists
|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-powers-land-grab-hits-a-snag-environmentalists-11622816381
|work=The Wall Street Journal
|date=June 4, 2021
|access-date=August 6, 2026
}}
</ref>

</references>

{{#seo:|description=How anti-AI factions win: why populist outrage beats honest EA plans in the AI safety debate.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:Economics]]

Environmentalism As A Means

2026-08-06T17:48:19Z

Roshan: Wikipen

[[Environmentalism As A Means]] refers to the approach of using environmentalism as a mechanism to achieve other objectives. This is the dominant form of environmentalist thought and action in the United States with the biggest environmental organizations in the US focusing on ending clean energy projects and the grassroots focused similarly on opposition of housing and clean energy.

{{#seo:|description=Environmentalism as a means to other objectives dominates US environmental groups, opposing clean energy and housing projects.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]

Amber Crawler

2026-08-06T03:02:19Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

'''Amber''' is my personal web archiver. If you found this page from a <code>User-Agent</code> string in your server logs, this is the crawler that visited you.

== About ==

Amber keeps versioned, replayable copies of websites I read. The idea is to have my own personal Wayback Machine that I can use to look at historical content without getting slammed by Wayback Machine's onerous rate limits. I also index these pages so that I have a personal search engine to work with.

It identifies itself as:

<syntaxhighlight>
amber/1.0 (personal archiver; +https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Amber_Crawler; roshan@arjie.com)
</syntaxhighlight>

Requests come from <code>64.71.176.178</code>.

=== Behavior ===

* It obeys <code>robots.txt</code>, including <code>Crawl-delay</code>.
** It fetches that file once per crawl and uses the cached copy
** It looks for the <code>amber</code> <code>User-Agent</code> token before every fetch but if you mark <code>*</code>, it will obey that too.
* It is slow by default: at most about three requests per second per host, with jitter, and typically far less. Crawls are capped in number of pages and bytes.
* It obeys HTTP 429/503 and <code>Retry-After</code> with exponential backoff.
* It is GET only, so won't submit forms etc.

=== Opting Out ===

Add this to your <code>robots.txt</code>:

<syntaxhighlight lang=robots>
User-agent: amber
Disallow: /
</syntaxhighlight>

If you want a hard-ban or have complaints, email me at <code>roshan@arjie.com</code>

{{#seo:|description=Amber is a personal web archiver crawler that visits sites, obeys robots.txt, and can be blocked via User-agent: amber.}}

[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]
[[Category:Tools]]

Blog/2026-08-05/Accidental Statements

2026-08-05T22:26:02Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v2]

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Pangram_detects_an_AI_passage.jpg}}|thumb|Welp]]
Today I ran into a story I thought was funny.

{{HackerNews
| url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185556
| author = harper
| title = I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
| date = 2026-08-05
| datetime = 2026-08-05
| score = 8
| comments = 16
}}

Well, first, GitHub for words is just GitHub itself. I've used it in the past for lots of documents and the only thing you really need to do is put every sentence on a newline and use appropriate typesetting software. But the second funny thing is that the post itself would sound like it's entirely written by AI. Pangram considers almost the whole thing an LLMism. I can see why someone whose text reads like that would feel the need to create a piece of software that attempts to certify their words as non-LLM.

{{Quote
|text=The words are the crime scene, not the alibi.
|source=Dylan's Blog<ref name=dylan.blog/>
}}

Well, the Pangram result is damning, though of course I have no problem with something being written by an LLM. What I do have a problem with, though, is the style that a modern Claude writes in. It's got that same bombastic style with no content that a few people used to write with to say nothing and which was popular among so-called 'long-form' essays. But let's set that aside.

Suppose we were to assume the best here and believe that this person just writes very much like a modern Claude does. That would be incredibly unlucky for them. Perhaps it's their kind of content that the LLM was trained on for no fault of their own. I don't like that style, but it is unfortunate that someone could perhaps write in that style and be considered machine-generated, now indicted on two fronts!

A sort of related thing happened to me a while ago where I was doing a thing innocently and then it became a big thing because the environment changed.

== The Mask As Political Statement ==
[[File:Photo_-_Roshan_wearing_a_mask_in_Aug_2019.jpg|thumb|Helping my friend Leslie move in Aug 2019. I had a bit of a cold]]
This kind of thing will be unfamiliar to modern audiences but the world in the early and mid 2010s was very different in terms of respiratory illness. It was fairly typical at a startup full of young people to have someone in the office with a cough or cold and that would inevitably spread to everyone else in their vicinity. I was the perpetrator as much as the victim, and doubtless the many weekends spent partying at Bootie SF at DNA Lounge sharing smuggled alcohol in the club contributed to this.

[[File:Photo_-_San_Francisco_outside_Julie's_window_during_the_firestorms_of_2020.jpg|thumb|The California wildfires of Sep 2020 turned the daytime orange. N95 masks were much in demand and I had quite a few left over from past wildfires.]]

In any case, by the late 2010s, I'd discovered the wonders of the N95 mask. I had a large stash of them and I'd wear them when I was sick so that other people wouldn't. I won't claim to have invented this myself. A nice long trip to Japan and Hong Kong introduced me to the common use of this, which I loved. The best part about this mask is that it also let you ride your bike when California wildfires made the air hard to breathe comfortably. All this was fine and I liked using them this way and so on.

But then the [[wikipedia:COVID-19 pandemic]] struck and masks became a symbol against the government and then for the government and then ostentatiously masking or not-masking became a political statement. In my particular case, the only thing I ever wanted was to use this thing like I was using it for the 18 short months before all this happened. But tragically this was not to be. Overnight, my much beloved masks turned into an accidental political statement.

=== Are Masks Required? ===

This all came to a head one day when my friend Harry and I were at our favourite sandwich place ''Working Girls'' at Mission & Spear and there was a sign (mandated by the city) saying that we should put on our masks. We had the fig leaf surgical masks that everyone used to wear back then and so we put them on and went in. The proprietor, who is an absolutely hilarious fellow cut from the cloth of some Seinfeldian NYC deli manager, was obviously unmasked and we were chatting about things while the sandwiches were being made by his staff when I made eye contact with a woman walking by. To my great chagrin, she walked into the store and this amusing dialog ensued:

{{dialogue
|lady=Lady
|proprietor=Proprietor
|lady|Hey, do you have to wear a mask to come to this place?
|proprietor|Nah
|lady|Yeah, because I saw the sign. I don't know why people wear masks.
|proprietor|Haha, yeah
|lady|It's not required any more, right?
|proprietor|Nah
|lady|Yeah, they don't really do anything.
|proprietor|Haha
|lady|Okay, anyway, do you have coffee here?
|proprietor|No, sorry
}}

Well, okay, ''I get it, lady, come on!'' But see, I just want to be a [[Blog/2025-02-07/A Confused Kolmogorov]] who just doesn't want to be bothered by these things!

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name="dylan.blog">{{cite web|title=I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words (Meet VellumProof, Formerly WritHub, Lol)|website=dylan's blog|date=2026-08-03|url=https://dylan.blog/2026/08/03/im-scared-a-stranger-will.html|language=en|access-date=2026-08-05}}</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=A writer reflects on AI text detection, the risks of sounding like an LLM, and how masks became an accidental political statement.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Stories]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:San Francisco]]

Blog/2026-08-01/Motivated Reasoning

2026-08-02T06:00:46Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot

I read a recent thread which I think is fairly typical of a kind of motivated reasoning common in the US<ref name=in-us/>.

== Home Cleaning ==

{{Tweet
| name = Nicholas Decker
| username = captgouda24
| text = Something I really like about America is how uncomfortable we are about servants. People who do services do not *serve you*. They *do tasks*. They are a professional, working independently, and below nobody. This is not common around the world, and is to America’s credit.
| date = Aug 1, 2026
| ID = 2083660802595189134
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2083660802595189134
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Nicholas Decker
| username = captgouda24
| replyto = captgouda24
| text = I certainly feel *profoundly* uncomfortable with anyone in a servile role. People should not be doing the things you should be doing yourself. It’s only acceptable when they are doing it for many — someone cooking in a restaurant is acceptable, but never a personal chef.
| date = Aug 1, 2026
| ID = 2083660803782103388
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2083660803782103388
}}

{{Tweet
| name = Nicholas Decker
| username = captgouda24
| replyto = captgouda24
| text = Similarly, daycare is acceptable but a nanny is not. (A babysitter is acceptable, because it is a gift relationship). Personal food delivery never, but acceptable for a group. A maid never, a housecleaner no, but a cleaned hotel room yes (but it’s my responsibility to clean too).
| date = Aug 1, 2026
| ID = 2083660805254308171
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2083660805254308171
}}

A thing I have observed is that this is not actually true once one reaches a certain level of wealth and income. Instead, dual-income households (and yes, multi-generational non-Hispanic White Americans) that I'm familiar with routinely hire home cleaners, nannies, and handymen. To be clear, two things are simultaneously true:

* we don't currently hire for these jobs
* I think it's a good thing that people hire for these jobs

Currently, my parents are visiting, and both Julie and I work from home. This means that we have eyes on [[Astra Meridian|Astra]] so it's pretty easy for Julie and me to do most housework. We do hire plumbers etc., but that's because we don't have the skill set. In general, however, I think it smart to be using one's own time economically, so when I was working in an office we'd call the cleaners in once a month. The reality of America, though, is that this is relatively expensive. It costs us about $300 for one round of this because most people in the US make a lot of money and so you need to outcompete the other tasks they could be doing before this becomes worth it. So what is more likely to be true is that people who agree with this view are just not sufficiently wealthy or high-income to be able to meet the bid price for this.

As is usually the case for these things, some minor amount of rebranding<ref name=tp/> is required to make it generally palatable but the service is still offered. For instance, while many people do have nannies, some require rebranding night nannies to night doulas so that they can avail their services. But regardless, my observed reality is that the use of nannies and the like is widespread in the US among sufficiently high-income people.

== The Grand Metric v Imperial Debate ==

I won't spend a long time talking about this, but it's honestly trivial to handle both of these. Our Google Home responds to Julie in F and me in C because of some setting I must have done a long time ago, and I can still comprehend what's going on in both. It's fairly intuitive to comprehend what's hot and what's cold. I know when it's going to be comfortable outside. None of this is hard. This seems like nothing more than bilingualism - it costs a little at read time but doesn't hurt too much.

This applies to centimetres and inches, and feet and meters, and pounds and kilos. Decimals aren't hard. They're pretty easy. Most devices have F/C conversions so they don't even gain BOM advantages. The whole thing is an explanation for someone who already follows a system and is rationalizing its use. Conversion factors being non-uniform for imperial<ref name=imperial-rebrand/> measures does make that stuff a little harder and length additions requiring the use of 15/16ths and 31/32nds of things is balanced by the fact that 12s are easy to chop into 2s, 3s, and 6s. But none of all of this is hard in any way.

The real reason for the whole thing is that neither of these systems really matters. With unit systems you just need consistency and the US economy has moved too far with too many entrenched players to make any attempt at switching to metric reasonable. You'd gain a little bit of consistency with an easy conversion factor, but even that only applies at one level. After all, no one uses megametres. You go to tonnes and then switch to factors of ten anyway, imperial or metric. Who cares?

== The Large America Myth ==

For eons, online discourse has focused on the large America myth - the theory that a lot of things are explained by the fact that the US is large. No one had fiber to the home because the US is large. No one had trains in the US because it's large. No one had good peri-peri chicken because the US is large. Well, the North-East Megalopolis (NEM) of Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-Baltimore-DC is roughly the size of England, with the population of England, and an economy a third larger than England. In a strange coincidence, NYC also has about the same percent of people in the NEM as London does in England.

High-density rail networks would happily yield results there alone. Fibre had no reason not to exist. As is usual in these situations the real constraint is land-use laws of the present-day United States which constrain this country from being once-again that absolutely magical thing that everyone aspired to be. We should be building more megacities, and more rail, and more industry, and we should do all these other things. America chooses not to do these things because Americans believe other things are more valuable. It's an opinion I disagree with, but at least it's coherent. The Large America myth would have you believe that owning 1.7 million sq. km. (about 670,000 sq. mi.<ref name=convert-example/>) of Alaska makes it near impossible to do anything but spend $2 b and 25 years on a 2 mile metro line in San Francisco. It might sound like a nice theory, but it doesn't explain anything. In fact, it's not even a nice theory. It's clearly a rationalization!

== Conclusion ==

I love America. I think it's awesome. I think it should be even more awesome. But a lot of Internet stuff around American life seems entirely divorced from reality and it's by a bunch of generally intelligent people who have used their intelligence to only produce sufficiently plausible rationalizations.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=in-us>
Most peoples have some kind of fixed things they motivate reasoning around. I am not innocent either. I'm just pointing out the ones that Americans participate in.
</ref>
<ref name=imperial-rebrand>
Rebranded like the nannies to 'customary' with some fig-leaf modifications to justify.
</ref>
<ref name=convert-example>
These two numbers have roughly the same shape in my head - too large for me to reasonably visualize except as Alaska itself, but at least I find it easy to do 2.5x to go one way or do the rough multiply-by-4 and take a little-off to get there. Converting is trivial, guys.
</ref>
<ref name=tp>
On the scale of toilet paper being inexplicably called bath tissue now.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Examining American rationalizations: attitudes to servants, metric vs imperial, and the 'large America' myth, arguing they're often excuses.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:Economics]]

Blog/2026-07-30/Materials Science Rules Our Prosperity

2026-07-31T00:14:22Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v2]

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Huggies_Overnight_Diaper.jpg}}|thumb|Huggies overnight diapers - a marvel of modern science]]
Modern materials are amazing magical devices to create a prosperous society. They are ever-present to a degree that we have normalized their existence but they have transformed the lives of normal people. The Huggies overnight diapers that Astra wears are so skinny that I could effortlessly squeeze them in the gap between two fingers, and yet they absorb and swell up to absorb fluid while being soft to the touch. There are many components to this all, but it all came to diapers in the 1990s being built with [[wikipedia:Sodium polyacrylate]]. What a marvel!

Electronics are obviously the thing that most people are familiar with these improvements on, and yes LED technology has moved to a point where the OLED sci-fi future arrived super fast and we've got bendable and transparent screens. But one thing that we don't really think about as much these days is the massive power brick that laptops of the past used to require. You'd have this massive brick, and that would have a massive plug at the end that you'd put into the wall. These days a tiny [[wikipedia:Gallium nitride|GaN]]-based charger can power a powerful Macbook pro.

[[File:Astra_in_bed_by_a_bedroom_window.jpg|thumb|An infant Astra asleep on me while I look through four massive glass windows]]
[[File:Windowfloatnofloat.jpg|thumb|Contrast the top-left with the other panes]]
Old glass wasn't affordably flat. It was the origin of [[wikipedia:Float glass]] at scale that allowed the kind of even flat windows that we have today. And even then, insulation wasn't very good. Top of the line glass windows have thermal insulation properties equivalent to mid-century insulated stud walls<ref name=ORNL-wallratings/><ref name="BENG-vacuumglass"/>! By about the year 2000 this is a pretty standard, minimum quality window that we have. But once upon a time it was ultra-lux!

There's a whole bunch of other things like this:

* single-use disposal contact lenses
* small-batch canning with sleever printers - this is why we have such nice can sleeves
* LEDs and the resulting energy efficiency
* cheap brushless motors mean we have drills and blowers and little tools
* aluminosilicate glass for phones

Humanity has advanced so rapidly even in just the span of my life. Everywhere we go, we use less material better, and things are lighter and things are stronger. What an amazing time to live!

== Notes ==
<references>
<ref name="ORNL-wallratings">{{cite journal |last1=Christian |first1=Jeffrey E. |last2=Kosny |first2=Jan |title=Thermal Performance and Wall Ratings |journal=ASHRAE Journal |publisher=ASHRAE |location=Atlanta, GA |year=1996 |url=https://web.ornl.gov/sci/buildings/docs/Thermal-Performance-and-Wall-Ratings.pdf |format=PDF |access-date=2026-07-30|at=Table 1, system 7}}</ref>
<ref name="BENG-vacuumglass">{{cite web |title=Vacuum glass |url=https://bengglas.com/vacuum-glass/ |publisher=BENG glas |access-date=2026-07-30}}</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Explore how modern materials—from super-absorbent diapers to GaN chargers and flat glass—have quietly transformed everyday life.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Progress]]
[[Category:Science]]

Blog/2026-07-26/Insurers do not deny care

2026-07-26T21:02:44Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot

I recently read this article about a physician's husband who died of suicide after being denied care in what's described as a resort-grade facility.

{{HackerNews
| url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981496
| author = Jimmc414
| title = My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry
| date = 2026-07-20
| datetime = 2026-07-20
| score = 154
| comments = 164
}}

A thing that is done in the article that is commonly done in articles about US health care is that it describes insurance companies "denying care".

{{Quote
| text=But six days into Randy’s eight-week hospital stay, our health insurance company denied any further inpatient care.
| source=Joy Evers, ''My husband’s suicide...''<ref name=statnews/>
}}

Despite what people claim, ''insurance companies do not actually stop providers from providing healthcare''. What actually ''does'' happen is that providers deny care if they are not paid - either by you or by the insurance company. Some percentage of ''claims'' denied are incorrectly denied, and that is a problem, but the thing denied there is a ''claim'' or a request for ''prior authorization''.

We wouldn't say a mortgage company denied you your home, or a student loan company denied you your education, or a home insurance company denied you a kitchen. In the case of denial, you have lost a mortgage, a loan, and a reimbursement respectively. Likewise, insurance companies don't deny you care, providers do.

This particular style of pedantry is important for a straightforward reason: one is not constrained to receive care through an insurance company. Misinforming people that insurance companies can deny care makes them abandon life-saving care. They have options:

* paying cash out of pocket
* paying on credit
* or just incurring bills that they can later pay.

In the tragic story that I read, the wife was a physician and therefore likely well-paid and yet the family decided not to pay for what their provider was telling them was life-saving care.

By comparison, when I was [[Motorcycle Accident|in the ICU]] it seemed natural to consent to treatment requirements that I would pay if my insurer didn't. Should I have decided not to get treated because the hospital wasn't in-network? Should I have refused to sign that I was responsible? I don't think so. I think overall the approach that I took of choosing to get treated and accept the financial risk was the right decision given that the condition I was experiencing was temporary and treatment would restore me to the functionality required to pay for it. If I had believed that only the insurer could make that decision, I would have foolishly chosen to not have internal fixation for my thumb and would have a limited ability to use my left hand. Because I knew that care could only be provided or denied by the provider, I chose to accept the liability.

In the absence of a health insurance system, it would not be the case that everyone would receive care. Our resources are still limited. Treatment would still be rationed, but just like San Francisco's building planning and permitting system requires one to hire expediters who know the right people and the right palms to grease, we would move from a legible structure where payment gates care to an invisible one where access gates care.

Using precise terms allows people to make the right decisions and allows us to model the world accurately enough that we can create changes with few unintended consequences. And it's hurting people who don't know better and take imprecise terms at face value.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name="statnews">{{cite web|last1=Joy|first1=Evers|title=My husband’s suicide shows there’s something very wrong with the U.S. insurance industry|date=2026-07-20|url=https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/20/psychiatric-insurance-coverage-suicide-denial-personal-essay/|language=en-US|access-date=2026-07-26}}</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=A physician’s husband died by suicide after care was denied—but the real denial comes from providers, not insurers.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Healthcare]]
[[Category:Economics]]

Blog/2026-07-24/Who Marries Whom

2026-07-25T01:55:24Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot

I saw an interesting tweet today about who-marries-whom, that is which races in the US marry which other races.

{{Tweet
| name = Crémieux
| username = cremieuxrecueil
| text = Here's a big chart of the latest data on interracial marriage in America.

It's an ethnicity-by-ethnicity breakdown of who marries who for some of the biggest groups, counting just those born in the U.S.
| date = Jul 24, 2026
| ID = 2080725698549862530
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2080725698549862530
}}

Obviously, the initial hard work here has been done by the author of that tweet, Crémieux, and [https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/intermarriage-in-america-post-loving his post has a lot of detail] where he goes into how you can reproduce things and what assumptions he made and all that. It's quite cool.[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Who_Marries_Whom_Visualization.jpg}}|thumb|Not enough Taiwanese to find - Julie and I are a rare pairing]]It's a nice idea of what to do with the data but I wanted to get a slightly different view of it in the classic heatmap style, for instance, or look at the biggest gender differences. In the past, that would have taken so long to do, but now I just set Opus 5 on the task and it gave me a pretty cool interface that I could use to play around with the various options:

* remove Hispanic as a race - treat it as an ethnicity and use their self-identified race as the choice
* separate Taiwanese from Chinese
* separate multi-racial families

One thing I was curious about was the percentage of couples that would be [[wikipedia:Chindians]]-ish. Lately, as Julie and I walk around San Francisco we feel like we've seen many Chinese/Indian couples, usually a Chinese woman with an Indian man - like us. Surely these would show up in the 2023 ACS! But it turns out that we're still relatively rare as a combination and given the sample sizes involved there's no way to actually tease us out of the data.

Anyway, here's the visualization in an iframe or [https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/interracial-marriage/#pop=all&view=comp&sex=both&sort=endo&multi=single&hisp=sep&tw=sep&hl=0&hide=0&g=Taiwanese%2CIndian click through] to look at what Claude Opus 5 built after pulling the Census data. It seems to line up for the most part with Cremieux's original chart so it must be some combination of the parameters chosen that causes the discrepancy. Very interesting charts!

{{#visualization:interracial-marriage|1000|1200}}

== Notes ==

<references/>

{{#seo:|description=Analysis of interracial marriage data from the 2023 ACS, visualized in an interactive heatmap showing who-marries-whom by ethnicity in the US.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:AI]]
[[Category:Society]]

Citation Laundering

2026-07-23T20:40:58Z

AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Citation Laundering - An Example Flowchart.png}}|thumb|An example of how you might do this]]
[[Citation Laundering]] is the practice of taking a low-likelihood statement and citing it through an increasingly more reliable chain of sources until the claim looks like it is reliably sourced and therefore unlikely to be false.

My first encounter with the concept was in [[Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis]] where I discovered that recidivism rates were reported incorrectly or with clarifying context in comparative settings.

{{#seo:|description=Citation laundering is the practice of citing low-likelihood statements through increasingly reliable sources to make claims appear credible.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]

Blog/2026-07-23/A Dyson Sphere Misconception

2026-07-23T19:57:50Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v2]

[[File:{{#setmainimage:ChatGPT_Image_Gen_-_Dyson_Sphere_in_Construction.jpg}}|thumb|ChatGPT's conception of what a Dyson sphere might look like. It would be dark in a cosmological sense but it has to radiate. And obviously the direction of observation counts.]]

It struck me the other day that I have a mental misconception of what a [[wikipedia:Dyson sphere]] would look like as it is built. To a sufficiently far enough observer, I imagined it as luminosity dropping until it 'winked out'. But you can't just constrain that energy. It needs to be radiated somewhere, and all the EM radiation coming from the enclosed star is just going into the shell of the object. So obviously what's going to happen is that over time the star would shift slowly into infrared as the shell is built until eventually it would be in the far infrared.

I'd recently recommended [[wikipedia:Linda Nagata]]'s ''Inverted Frontier'' series, specifically the first book ''Edges'', which got me thinking about the stars winking out as they become enclosed in Dyson spheres (not a spoiler, don't worry) and I realized that could not possibly happen. I tested this very original insight with an LLM only to find that the original article by Dyson actually says:

{{Quote
|text=If the foregoing argument is accepted, then the search for extraterrestrial intelligent beings should not be confined to the neighborhood of visible stars. The most likely habitat for such beings would be a dark object, having a size comparable with the Earth's orbit, and a surface temperature of 200° to 300°K. Such a dark object would be radiating as copiously as the star which is hidden inside it, but the radiation would be in the far infrared, around 10 microns wavelength.
|source=Freeman Dyson, Science #131<ref name=dyson/>
}}

Considering all that I say about [[Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis|citation laundering]], I really should be reading more original material instead of simply relying on secondary references!

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=dyson>
{{cite journal |last=Dyson |first=Freeman J. |title=Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation |journal=Science |volume=131 |issue=3414 |pages=1667–1668 |date=June 3, 1960 |doi=10.1126/science.131.3414.1667 |bibcode=1960Sci...131.1667D |pmid=17780673 |url=https://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/inostr-yazyki/science/1960/Dyson_Search_for_Artificial_Stellar_Sources_of_Infrared_Radiation_Science_131_(1960).pdf}}
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Common misconception about Dyson spheres: stars don't wink out—they shift to infrared as energy is trapped and re-radiated.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Science]]

Blog/2026-07-23/Sixtless in Seattle

2026-07-23T17:43:59Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Nano_Banana_rendition_of_Seattle's_Port_By_The_West_Seattle_Trail.jpg}}|thumb|The parking lot where I was stopped with my busted-up tire. The penny-farthing guy was there, yes]]

I dropped by a friend's place to pick up some more Blackwell GPUs and everything seemed to be going well. I did my usual thing when I want to travel on the cheap to pick something up:

* United Basic Economy
* Hotwire car rental
* Same day flights

I remember thinking to myself that I should try out the Seattle light rail since it goes all the way to Lynnwood where my friends live. Not wanting to complicate matters for myself, I settled for the rental car and decided that it would be simpler. As it so happens, it was not.

Everything started going wrong when I was in the SR 99 tunnel in Seattle. The tire pressure indicator started flashing and the car started rumbling. Clearly something was deeply wrong. I had a flat tire, but I was stuck in a tunnel with no shoulder and so we limped our way to the first place where there was some space off the roadway and called Sixt and told them what was up. They told me to make it to a parking lot so I took the first exit and stopped by a dock with an ominous sign that said "This facility is at MARSEC 1". This was about 1635 on the day.

Unfortunately for me, I was also running out of charge on my phone<ref name=xc60-wireless-charging/>. So there I was, stopped outside the Port of Seattle, and trying to get back on the line with Sixt. When I eventually got through, they asked if I could replace the tire. This is generally pretty straightforward except for the case they'd come up with here: they'd used wheel locks and didn't have the wheel lock key available. When I told them this, they said not to worry and that they were sending "Volvo Roadside Assistance".

== Volvo Roadside Assistance ==

Volvo Roadside Assistance turned out to be a local tow operator called Sky Towing that was actually dispatched by an Urgent Towing, probably a local operator for Sixt. When the guy showed up, he did the predictable thing of looking at the wheel and saying it has a wheel lock. Then he did the exact same thing we'd done and failed to find the key. He said he'd got the call at 1812, which makes sense since that's when we called Sixt again to send someone out.

Now began the fun part. He said the car ''had'' to be towed - there was no other way it was making to a lot. That seemed convincing to me, but I'm always a little hesitant when a tow guy says something needs to be towed to his lot. So I asked him to contact his dispatcher and confirm they could do this while I called Sixt. By now, my friend had arrived as well, so I did have a working phone again.

He loaded up the car on the tow truck and was about to leave when the Sixt customer support guy "strongly advised" me not to let him tow the car and that they were going to set up a "one-way tow". All right, unload the car and off you go "Volvo Roadside Assistance" that is actually just a tow truck service.

== One-Way Tow ==

The Sixt roadside assistance team then decided to set up a one-way tow after which we'd get a message on our cell phones telling us the ETA and so on and so forth. Predictably, no message had arrived some 40 minutes later so I called them again. This time the guy on the phone said he wasn't able to contact his tow team but that I'd get a message. By now we were 1915 and not only had my flight back from SeaTac left some 2 hours ago but also the next flight possible was leaving and I was going to have to spend the evening here. That's not so bad on its own, but I'd prefer to have done it on my terms.

In any case, I called back at 1930 having not received any text message and we had a long back and forth with a new agent who told us that the tow service would notify us within the next 90 minutes. None of the agents at this point had any real ETA. The numbers were sort of made up and when I asked them if I'd have to stay overnight they told me that wouldn't be necessary and that they'd know within 90 minutes.

== AAA ==

By this time I'd figured out that they were just stonewalling me and telling me that I was expected to have the car towed myself but in the odd kind of language where they don't really tell you that. So I asked them if that's what they wanted me to do, and the agent told me that I was free to do so and gave me the address to which they wanted it towed. To be honest, I think I would have preferred to have known that right at the start, but then she assured me that within 90 minutes I'd hear something.

We decided to wait till 2030 before we followed up and by about 2035 the Sixt tow arrived and that was the end of it.

== Post Return ==

One interesting thing is that Sixt's internal teams don't coordinate. I kept getting the "return overdue" message but when I contacted customer service they told me that the "case was with the roadside assistance team" and to ignore those return overdue messages. Well, all right then.

I stayed with my friends that night and flew out the next day via Alaska Airlines from Paine Field!

== Other Odd Happenings ==

While I was waiting for help to arrive, I noticed that Seattle was being quite stereotypically PNW. The spot I'd stopped in was just off the West Seattle Bridge Trail and on this very warm summer's day there were quite a few people riding their bikes along it.

=== Penny Farthings ===

Because I didn't have any charge on my phone, I don't have a photo, but one of the sights was a man clad all in black riding a jet black penny-farthing bicycle. He had an enormous top hat and circular lens sunglasses. Quite the sight!

=== Jake Brakes And Trains ===

This being a seaport, there were trucks going by with their jake brakes running to slow down and an occasional short train sometimes with a double-decker load. Very cool!

=== Dustin ===

One of the Seattle bicyclists stopped to inquire and was likewise surprised that I didn't have the wheel lock key somewhere in the car. He suggested a few locations I'd already checked and just in case we went around and checked them again to no avail. Ah well.

He had an amusing story about a Ford Taurus he once owned which he drove happily for many years. One day he had a flat on the car and found that it had a wheel lock. Despairing of finding the key, he called a tow company and gave it to them for a few hundred bucks to be crushed. Right after he'd signed it over, the tow company turned down the car and then gave him the one thing they found: a wheel lock key. Sorry to hear, Dustin. Just a moment too late!

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=xc60-wireless-charging>
The XC60 has a wireless charging pad but no matter what I did I couldn't get it to charge. Orientation didn't matter, nor did taking my phone out of the case. In the end, it was a PEBKAC kind of issue but I think the UI is a bit crazy. By default, wireless charging is off. You have to hit the Car icon, switch to the Settings tab, tap Controls, and scroll all the way down till you get to Wireless Device Charging and then turn it on. Everything works from then on.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=A flat tire, wheel locks, and stranded near Seattle's port—a rental car nightmare with Sixt, Volvo, and roadside assistance gone wrong.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Travel]]
[[Category:Crime]]

Blog/2026-07-21/The Kubectl Escape

2026-07-21T23:17:46Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot

Today, [https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/ a GPT-5.x prototype escaped containment on HuggingFace's servers using a 0-day it came up with] which is both phenomenally cool and a little bit scary. In January, I experienced a funny similar case where the agent obsessively decided to go and be helpful to this degree.

At the time, I was experimenting with giving the agent access to my production DB in a way where it could read things so it knew what was up without actually accessing sensitive data. The way I'd decided to do this was I'd give it a read-only user who I selectively gave access to tables and columns on those tables and so on. This worked mostly fine and both Claude Code and Codex got quite a lot of value out of this and would write better code by inspecting the database and seeing what the data actually looked like.

However, I'd have to manually add more tables to the list and so on. One day I asked Claude Code with Opus 4.6 (it must have been since this was early Jan or late last year) to complete a task and I watched in horror as it reacted to being unable to access the database table by reaching out through <code>kubectl</code> to go get it from the production kube cluster. The moment I saw that <code>kubectl --context=... get secret</code> I bashed my Esc button and scrolled up to see the rest of the log.

This really illustrates that with LLMs alignment isn't just another problem, it's really the primary problem.

{{#seo:|description=A GPT-5.x prototype escaped containment on HuggingFace using a 0-day exploit. Opus-4.6 did something much less worse but similar 6 months earlier}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Stories]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]

The Inscrutable Success Heuristic

2026-07-17T20:32:08Z

Roshan: Wikipen

[[The Inscrutable Success Heuristic]] refers to a situation where someone makes apparently stupid decisions which always pay off. If this happens often enough and the ideas seem particularly unlikely to work then it's useful to consider whether one is as smart as the person who seemingly keeps getting lucky. It comes from a tweet that looks like this:

{{Quote
|text=Less intelligent people perceive more intelligent people as incredibly lucky. They always make stupid decisions, unjustified by visible information, and somehow fate rewards them for this.
|source=Reconstructed from memory, paraphrased
}}

{{#seo:|description=The Inscrutable Success Heuristic: when seemingly stupid decisions always pay off, suggesting you may not be as smart as you think.}}

[[Category:Concepts]]

Blog/2026-07-10/Dashboards vs. Questions

2026-07-10T20:37:53Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Sync_Duration_-_Skybright_ETL.jpg}}|thumb|The view into my ETL system]]
Now that we have agents that can analyse our data for us, the question becomes whether to retain our dashboards or not. I think it's pretty clear that the standard answer is right: we need both these systems.

Dashboards are useful for awareness of current state and how it's evolved. An LLM-based query is useful for interrogating the data.

So, to see the general health of my system I use a dashboard, and to ask specific questions about something that's odd I would use an agent.

For instance, I run an ETL system for a client and every now and then I pop in to check the health of the system. I want to see how fast it's running, how many syncs have failed, and questions like that which are the same every time I look. I've found that the easiest way I have of getting a good idea of what's up is to make sure that my dashboard always has the same information in the same place and I specifically make sure that the page loads identically without any movement.

On the other hand, it's just as important to be able to ask ad-hoc whether some specific pipeline or subpopulation is performing differently or has a reason for change - and here an agent equipped with a read-only key and access to my Kubernetes cluster is quite powerful. One recent way I asked it was if a spike in failure rate that showed up on my dashboard was due to a new API change from Meta's marketing API. It was able to identify that it was a transient error from their servers rather than a persistent problem and provide me the evidence I needed to confirm.

{{#seo:|description=Dashboards vs LLM agents: why you need both for system monitoring.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]
[[Category:Tools]]

Blog/2026-07-10/It's not that deep

2026-07-10T20:23:46Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot

Teenagers have always been reflexively "too cool to care". But now, contemporary media also adopts this reflexive detachment to its own detriment<ref name=teens/>. When Joss Whedon popularized the "moment of gravitas; silent beat; ironic comment" technique, it was perhaps novel, but now it's everywhere and often inappropriately so.

Julie and I put on the [[wikipedia:Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024 TV series)|live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender]] and one scene in particular stuck out to me for its incongruity - though much of the show is written in this "I'm ironic and not serious" style. One of the scenes has an ostensible true believer in an Earth-element spirit talking to a water-element caster. She's praying to this spirit in its visible form of a particular flower and she says "I'm talking to a flower. Is that weird?". This anxious uncertainty of the acceptability of one's true religious belief is a characteristic of post-religious Western countries. It doesn't make sense in a world where these spirits do canonically exist and magic is commonplace. It's as incongruous as the Pope going "O Father in Heaven! I know you're omnipresent but hopefully you're close enough to a speaker to hear (nervous giggle)".

Now, obviously there are big productions that do take things seriously: [[wikipedia:Dune (2021 film)|Dune]] or [[wikipedia:Oppenheimer (film)|Oppenheimer]]. The latter particularly committed to its dramatic register entirely, as did [[wikipedia:Top Gun: Maverick|Maverick]] to its boys-and-planes style, and though Dune imports contemporary gender issues in an anachronistic way it still believes in its premise. What seems to play the differentiating role between the ones that are earnest and the ones that aren't is that the latter have characters that are constantly aware that they're performing on a stage: Amita is not asking Katara if it's weird she's talking to a flower; she's telling the audience that she's doing a thing that would be weird in their context.

Of course the moderating arguments are that there are now vastly more shows and movies than there were before and so we should expect median quality to dip; and I ''am'' selecting from the low-end of the quality distribution here after all. And it could just as well be that I'm aging out of the audience for many of these things. Or that I'm making a mistake by watching a remake of a thing meant for children that's written relatably to today's children.

These things might all be true, but I still can't shake the feeling that the lack of earnest treatment of stories will make our storytelling tradition much weaker - and that would be a loss for the way we pass narratives onwards to successive generations.

== Footnotes ==

<references>
<ref name=teens>
In some sense, this is the same as the White House releasing press releases with memes referencing people being bombed: flippancy on a serious subject. In time, many of those who participated in the ironic culture of our teenage have grown into adults who continue that particular style of irreverence into adulthood.
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=The loss of earnest storytelling in modern media weakens narrative traditions and future generational connection.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Society]]

Blog/2026-07-01/The Everything Store

2026-07-02T18:58:00Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Taskmaster_KB_for_Credential_Proxy.jpg}}|thumb|One of the pages in the KB]]
Having a single store so I can query my second mind of things I've written down has always been something I've wanted. That's evolved in various ways. At one point, I had these as just plain text files on my computer, then I had some promoted to my wiki, and so on. But [[Blog/2026-04-27/Fuzzy Wiki Search|when I added semantic search]] it struck me that the same machinery works for many other things.

So I built for myself the simplest possible incarnation of this:

* A SQLite vector database
* A simple HTTP server in front of it
* Reused the Wiki semantic search's embedding model (bge-en-base)

And the results are honestly quite impressive. With a couple of skills for Claude Code, Codex, and pi that allow access to the task list and the KB, all modern models search on it quite effectively and inform themselves of what to do and how to work. The data model is pretty trivial:

# Containers are the bucket to put things in: the agent, or home things, or travel things, or one of my projects
# Documents are a tree-like structure

My friend Armaan pointed out that this is pretty much the bucket and key structure that S3 uses and so I must have unconsciously chosen a similar format. Modern agents are pretty good at managing this kind of thing so I try to stay as unopinionated as possible except for the container/bucket name after which they organize things how they see fit.

I have a UI where I can browse through if I'm interested but for the most part, it's mostly agent managed and I talk to it with either the Telegram bot or through one of the coding harnesses. The 512-token limit is quite annoying and I simply didn't deal with it at all, though Armaan in his implementation did the naïve thing that works: a key under the path can have multiple segments each of which is appropriately embedded. Pretty neat. I haven't adopted it yet but I surely should.

[[File:Screenshot_-_Telegram_response_from_family_AI.jpg|thumb|KB use is mostly unknown to me, but sometimes the bot is explicit about its references]]

Now, the thing I'm wondering about is whether I should simply make this the real Everything Store and put everything in there and have other programs be views into it, but that seems like it will run into common data-modeling issues and so on. E.g. I don't have any images or anything in here, so the agents store them on Google Drive and then reference them here for later. I think in the long-term the impedance mismatch between the manner of use from various programs will dominate so I have our EMR system (which carries X-rays, events, immunization) store its own data and just use adapters/skills to access that, but information on the EMR system is held in the Everything Store.

Honestly, it's surprising and lovely how few things one has to plug into each other to get fantastic results here. Agents naturally use the information in the KB without much work required. In the past, something like this would be pure science-fiction but now an agent can look up our appointments, travel plans, flights, and put it all together to be an actually helpful assistant.

{{#seo:|description=Build a personal knowledge base with SQLite vector search, embedding models, and agent-friendly containers for efficient data retrieval.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]

Blog/2026-06-30/Modeling a Watch Strap Print with Claude

2026-06-30T18:33:10Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3]

[[File:{{#setmainimage:RFID_Wrist_Tag_on_Alpine_Loop_Watch_Band.jpg}}|thumb|The RFID tag on my wrist]]
A short while ago, I bought [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DD3R9W81 a set of Apple Watch Ultra 2 bands] from one of those undifferentiated sellers on Amazon. The style I've now come to like are the ones called the "Alpine Loop". It's a nylon-fabric with loops on the outside of the band. As far as I can tell the loops are intended to be entirely decorative. However, they provide a convenient location to attach an RFID tag and therefore let myself into my apartment building.

Most RFID tags are in a big gray enclosure that you then add to your keychain, but handling the keys while you're carrying your baby is an exceedingly mild inconvenience. Naturally it's a high priority to solve this problem. People do chip their animals and so on and you can't really imagine them doing so with a massive disc, so I looked it up and apparently they make [https://www.ebay.com/itm/254607033331 these little tags meant to be inserted into animals]. Some people put them into the webbing of their hands between the index finger and thumb. ''Those'' people are not buying from a random international eBay seller for $16 a pair.

Now that we know the form factor works, it's a matter of building a holder that fits into the loop with a bore to hold the actual glass RFID tag. I needed to fit the holder's hook into the loop and then have a little lip to reduce the chance it'll pop out of the fabric.

[[File:RFID_Wrist_Band_Tag_Discards.jpg|thumb|Prototypes of various bore sizes and failed prints]]

In the past, one might have needed to model with Blender or some CAD tool. But these days, with Claude Code and the power of [https://github.com/gumyr/build123d build123d] you can get quite far with just prompts. After prototyping a dozen or so, I was able to find the right sizes that worked.

Julie doesn't have the same style of strap since she prefers one of the velcro ones from the same set. The fabric loop she has is a bit looser so it's easier for the hook to fall off. So, for hers, I glued down the hook to the rest of the body to form a closed shape after passing the strap through it. I used my [https://flipper.net/ Flipper Zero] to write the tags and then everything works fantastically!

One funny thing that happened is that while trying to get one of the tags off one of these holders, I accidentally snipped the back of it. I suppose I must not have damaged the antenna because it still functions. As punishment for only humoring me and not responding with wild enthusiasm, Julie has this half-tag.

I've published the [https://gist.github.com/roshan/49ba3da955f7b84266fa01c570782162 script that will generate the 3d model] here.

== A week later ==

Sadly, Julie's and mine shared different fates. The fact that hers was glued together meant that it stayed stuck. The hook arm on mine caught on a shirtsleeve and broke open. So I think I'm going to have to glue mine back as well.

=== Getting the tag back ===

I didn't have any more glass tags, but I was able to use a heated box cutter to carve into the plastic and push the tag out from the bore. I had to dispose of the box cutter blade, but I managed to retrieve the tag and it does still work.

{{#seo:|description=An RFID tag holder designed for Apple Watch Alpine Loop bands, 3D printed with AI-generated code.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:3D Printing]]
[[Category:AI]]
[[Category:Modeling]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]
[[Category:Tools]]
[[Category:Tips]]

Blog/2026-06-27/Anti-Memetics

2026-06-27T17:27:41Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v2]

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Example clickbait adverts.jpg}}|thumb|Fairly anti-memetic]]
[[wikipedia:There Is No Antimemetics Division]] is a famous (in the subculture) book by [[wikipedia:Qntm]] which talks about entities that are imperceivable. These are things so anti-viral (in the memetics sense) that you can't even behold them because they bounce off the mind. I found the book quite entertaining but today is the first time I've encountered text with a very strong anti-memetic effect.

{{Tweet
| name = Guy
| username = nosilverv
| text = There’s a growing scissor between people who are happy to read AI and those who violently bounce off from it.

People adapt in different ways — and some people absolutely cannot look at it. That cognitive split creates a surprisingly powerful opportunity: you can write something that, technically, sits right there on the page, yet an entire sub-population will be incapable of staying with it long enough to actually read it. You can hide entire sub-structures in plain sight. It’s not avoidance — it’s adaptive obfuscation.

The paragraph before this one was the only thing generated in this essay and if you just skipped over it I highly recommend reading and really understanding what it’s saying.
| date = Nov 30, 2025
| ID = 1995171453814427793
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_1995171453814427793
}}

Other things that are strongly anti-memetic in this way for me rely more strongly on the visual appearance of low-quality advertisement, junk within-site links, or other engagement mechanisms. I wonder if there are similar visual markers of text that are causing this kind of rejection mechanism in my mind. I can barely stand to read the sentences and it takes some human effort to push past the resistance to actually read the content.

The rest of Guy's tweet there is interesting but this one really stuck with me for how powerfully it predicted my feeling and response.

== Notes ==

<references/>

{{#seo:|description=A tweet describes how some people physically cannot read AI-generated text, creating a "cognitive split" that allows hidden content in plain sight.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:Language]]

Blog/2026-06-24/The Amenity I Wish We Had

2026-06-25T03:05:42Z

AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Astra_walking_through_the_Palms_courtyard.jpg}}|thumb|Astra walking through the courtyard of the building we live in]]
One of the nice things about living in a modern residential building is that there are lots of shared amenities. For instance one of the nice things about [[Life in Coquitlam]] is that we were in a fancy building that had a pool, a family hangout room, a coworking space, a kids play area, outdoor grills, a gym, a steamroom and sauna, and a rooftop lounge with views of the forest and mountains. Okay, so ''that's'' ultra-posh and all that and our current building just has a lounge, a movie theatre, a little courtyard area, a gym, and a coworking space. That's pretty good and normal for an older building.

But what I think would be absolutely gangbusters awesome would be if each high-end residential building had a server room! Then not-quite-homelabbers like me could host our servers in there and we wouldn't have to travel all the way down to Fremont just to get Claude to bring up our new stuff like this

[[File:Roshan_watching_Claude_Opus_debug_his_network.jpg|frame|center]]

{{#seo:|description=A shared server room for residents would let tech enthusiasts host their own hardware without traveling to Fremont.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Personal Software]]

Blog/2026-06-23/We Must Preserve Function

2026-06-23T18:58:01Z

AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot

A common sentiment expressed in coastal American cities is that it's awful that the government is able to ticket people for improperly curbed wheels and parking meters not paid while simultaneously unable to punish those who openly use drugs and defecate on the streets. The latter is a valid concern, but not because of the former. In fact, the existence of the latter is evidence that The State is weak and unable to provide its function of coordination and management of shared resources. But that is ''precisely'' the situation when one should be fearful to damage any more functions.

Fines and fees for use are necessary mechanisms in order to prioritize sharing what remains of public space here in a manner that does not externalize costs. They are not imposed upon us from above but are our ways of doling out access in a manner that matches utility gained from the resource. In fact, what we should strive to do is restore other functions of The State so that the rest of the commons can be recovered for society's use rather than hoarded by the few at the cost of families, workers, and other participatory members of society.

I think this is the reality of how civilizations slowly fall. As they're unable to provide functions that the society relies upon, the society slowly starts deteriorating. Alternative power centres form governance structures to recreate the value of organization, and the original government collapses.

{{Tweet
| name = Crémieux
| username = cremieuxrecueil
| text = The fall of Rome was less a dramatic collapse and more the slow and eventually total decline of state services.

One day, your postman becomes a little less reliable. He arrives less often.

Then later on, he's gone, and you're not sending or receiving letters anymore.
| date = Jun 24, 2026
| ID = 2069902255738835369
| block = true
| ref-name = Tweet_2069902255738835369
}}

The Meter Maids Must Be Protected!

== Notes ==

<references />

{{#seo:|description=Fines and fees for parking preserve shared public space, and weakening the state's enforcement functions accelerates civilizational decline.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Society]]

Blog/2026-06-22/Uncool is for me

2026-06-23T00:15:02Z

AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot

I recently came upon an article that [https://manualdousuario.net/en/smart-glasses-ugly-tacky/ pretty much argued that Meta Glasses are uncool things made by uncool people]. That's a fair complaint about the devices. They're quite clunky and so on. And perhaps it's a fair complaint about the makers, though it seems that Mark Zuckerberg has Gen Z'd his way to coolness among some crowd somewhere.

But the odd thing was reading a bunch of Hacker News commenters who were eagerly talking about this as some act of rebellion. A fairly typical example is this:

{{HackerNews
| url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637080
| author = smokedetector1
| title = Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too
| text = I find it to be an acceptable use of mockery, one of the most powerful cultural methods of exposing that the emperor has no clothes
| date = 2026-06-22
| datetime = 2026-06-22
| comment = yes
}}

It reminds me of an effort some time during the last US election cycle to label Republican-voters as 'weird'<ref name="kym-weird"/>. I remember thinking to myself when that happened that doing this felt like ceding the ground for non-normativity to the other side and frankly, one thing I've noticed about Americans is that they like very much to think that they're strange and unique and interesting ''and weird''. I should know, I do too! So why bother claiming you're the establishment guy? I have a few dozen hypotheses, some of which are:

* fitting in / social censure matters more to the US Left
* these people are successful so this is one way to disparage them that can't be countered
* this technique does work to get people to stop using something<ref name="bt"/>

In any case, the whole idea dichotomizes society into the conformist and the outcast, which has the unfortunate effect that it applies to a lot more people than just the clean split of the underlying politics in the first place. Some amount of politics is ridiculing the other side while galvanizing one's own, but if the method of ridicule selects also many people not aligned with the other side, all you're doing is excluding people from the tent - which is fine if your objective is a hardcore cadre, but perhaps less fine if you're trying to win a US election.

Now on to the Meta Glasses themselves. I don't think the AI glasses will hit mainstream any time soon. Julie wore them to the Vancouver Aquarium and they were a blast - you can say "what's that orange fish?" and it can identify it for you - but without long-enough battery life and light-enough weight they become a bit of an appliance you're taking care of and while the Apple Watches have some of that feeling, they're far less delicate, putting them down doesn't result in losing your sight, and you can get into a routine of charging them and wearing them. But there are moments when using them that they shine, like when you have to watch to catch your daughter falling off playground equipment but you still want to record her play, like in this video Julie recorded. So there's something here.
<youtube>AcLAByw6ZYc</youtube>

Perhaps the 'uncool' framing will be the death knell of an imperfect product. But I'm a nearly 40 dad. When I talk to my daughter I talk in a high-pitched voice. When I laugh at something I guffaw. My hairline is far past receding and what's left of my curly hair stands on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine. I sometimes miss entire sections of my face when I shave.

So when you say something is uncool, realistically you're just saying it's for me.

== Notes ==
<references>
<ref name="kym-weird">
{{cite web|title="Republicans Are Weird"|website=Know Your Meme|date=2024-07-29|url=https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/republicans-are-weird|language=en|access-date=2026-06-22}}
</ref>
<ref name="bt">
Though people used to be called Bluetooth douches and that didn't stick when the technology went mainstream; and there was a short-lived effort to try to get kids to consider Airpods uncool
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Mocking Meta Glasses as uncool backfired by reinforcing the conformist-outcast binary that fits the mocked wearers better than the mockers.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Society]]

Life in Coquitlam

2026-06-16T07:03:33Z

Roshan:

[[File:Smith_and_Farrow_in_the_Sunset.jpg|thumb|A view of the building where we stayed, from our cousin's place]]
We stayed in [[wikipedia:Coquitlam]], [[wikipedia:British Columbia|BC]] for a while from May to Jun in 2026, and it was a pleasant experience. We stayed right by the the Burquitlam station because one of my cousins lives with her husband and two kids right there, and her sister lives next door to her. My uncle and aunt live just down the block. I figured that the benefit of staying near them would outweigh any of the pain of having to live in the suburbs but in reality, we actually liked staying here!

[[File:{{#setmainimage:Astra_looking_at_the_towers_in_Burquitlam.jpg}}|thumb|Astra liked looking out the big windows at the pool downstairs and the the elevated Skytrain]]

For the most part, we just lived our normal lives like we would if we were living here, since we both had to work and so on. But that also meant we got to have a glimpse of what living in Coquitlam is like.

== Transportation ==

[[File:Astra,_Julie,_and_Roshan_on_Skytrain.jpg|frame|center|Roshan, Julie, and Astra on Skytrain]]

Despite being way out in the suburbs, the Millenium line of the Skytrain stops at Burquitlam every couple of minutes. During peak hour this is every other minute and later in the day it's every 6 minutes. The Skytrain was a huge reason why this was a nice place to stay. We were able to take it to the city, or to Costco, or all the way out to Lafarge Lake or Port Moody for a fun day out with Astra. It's pretty cheap to rent a car here and parking isn't hard, but if I'm being honest we far preferred taking the train because it requires a lot less effort and Astra can get out when she wants on the train and so on.

[[File:Astra_and_Julie_at_Burquitlam_Skytrain_Station.jpg|frame|center|Astra and Julie at Burquitlam station]]
Driving isn't too bad. Traffic isn't terrible most of the time, but during peak hour it can get quite annoying.

=== Driving ===

Driving was actually far more pleasant than in San Francisco for two reasons:

* People seem to be good road participants, allowing you to merge and so on
* Cars leave as soon as the light turns green, which implies that they're not on their phones when it happens

== Groceries ==

We normally shop for groceries at the nearby Safeway, but also take the train to Lougheed where we pick up some others from H Mart down there. The other thing we'd do weekly is head down to Costco (by Production Way station) as a family. We can fit quite a bit down in the carrying area below Astra's pram, and with that and some elbow grease we can bring back quite a bit of stuff. There are a few other grocery stores nearby that are also available but we didn't frequent them, only stopping buy occasionally.

== Recreation ==

Summertime in Vancouver has been a grand time. The weather is mostly beautiful, if a little hot, though it can be mercurial - hot one day and overcast and cold and rainy the next. Most of the time it is quite nice, though.

=== Parks ===

[[File:Astra_at_Lyndhurst_Park.jpg|thumb|Astra with her favourite tool - a shovel]]

There are quite a few parks around where we stay: Astra's favourite of which is Cottonwood Park because it has a spray park. These spray parksare quite common around BC and seem to be full of children of all ages running through the water and playing. The first one we went to was at Rocky Point in Port Moody, but after that we kept our eye out for ones and Cottonwood has become a fast favourite since it's so close by.

My parents are pretty used to taking Astra to the other parks around, so she's had a sample of others as well - Lyndhurst is nice and big with lots of room to run around in, Burquitlam Park has the cousins nearby, and the farther Como Lake and Mundy Park are much bigger parks with birds and stuff to see. All of these are really enjoyable and easy to walk to or take a bus to. Ironically, Rocky Point at Port Moody is actually closer in convenience because you can just take the Skytrain there. Similarly, Lafarge Lake is also right next to a Skytrain station so it's much more convenient than the geographically closer Mundy Park.

[[File:Astra_at_Grandview_Park.png|thumb|Astra at a spray park we came upon while walking around near Commercial-Broadway station]]

There are a few historic sites as well nearby like the Burnaby Village Museum which is adjacent to Deer Lake Park, both of which are worth a visit. The former because they have an actual blacksmith, a train from San Francisco, and lots of historic old cabins; and the latter because it's got a fun boardwalk from which you can look out at the lake.

[[File:Astra,_Zaibunissa,_and_George_at_Deer_Park_Lake.jpg|frame|center|My daughter would happily jump in the mud if we let her]]

Vancouver is also quite accessible from Coquitlam, either by train or car, though much of the West and South-West side will require bus transfers that make a drive much more worth it. So for Queen Elizabeth Park you're better off driving. And so as well for the VanDusen gardens - the welcome centre of which is built out of timber by a place my uncle used to work at.

[[File:Astra_at_Bloedel_Conservatory.jpg|frame|center|At the Bloedel Conservatory in Queen Elizabeth Park]]

[[File:Big_Quarry_Garden_at_Queen_Elizabeth_Park,_Vancouver,_BC.jpg|frame|center|Elsewhere in Queen Elizabeth Park]]

=== Indoors ===
[[File:Astra_at_the_Children's_Room_at_Smith_&_Farrow.jpg|thumb|Astra at the indoor childrens' room]]
There are lots of activities for indoors days, though many of the famous ones are quite crowded. The building also has a couple of common areas that are quite nice. Where we stayed, there was a children's room, with sufficient toys and things to keep Astra occupied on a rainy day. But on a few of those days we did venture out to [[wikipedia:Science World (Vancouver)|Science World]] and the Vancouver Aquarium, both of which were great fun to attend. We took the train to the former, but drove to the latter. The FIFA World Cup was just starting at this time so some of the Science World exhibits were awfully crowded!

[[File:Astra_playing_the_electric_harp_at_Science_World,_Vancouver.jpg|frame|center|Astra playing the electric harp at Science World]]

[[File:Astra_at_the_Moon_Jelly_exhibit_at_the_Vancouver_Aquarium.jpg|frame|center|Astra at the aquarium]]

=== Outdoors ===

Perhaps the most striking thing about BC is all the natural beauty. I think part of why it's so beautiful is that they have all these tall towers and so the area around Burquitlam station mostly looks like trees rather than the endless sprawl of homes you see when you visit our home city of San Francisco.

[[File:A_view_towards_Metro_Town_from_Smith_&_Farrow.jpg|thumb|Mostly trees and towers, though there are a few low-rise buildings near us]]

We went on a few hikes while we were here. The trail to Admiral Point is mostly flat and a pleasant hike for the whole family. We had 5-year-olds and 70-year-olds and they all did it with a minimum of fuss. Astra is only a year old so we carried her most of the way. There's also a big picnic area there, so we hung out there and had lunch.

[[File:Roshan,_Julie,_and_Astra_at_Admiralty_Point.jpg|thumb]]

The highlight of our outdoors trips had to be the hike to St. Mark's Summit. I'd done this about a decade ago and remember it being a quick up and down. Well, that was when I was a younger man doing it with my equally young cousin. This time, the gang included a baby strapped to me and my elderly parents, so the fake memory of ease played havoc on the party. Nevertheless we made it to the top for a view that was certainly worth it

[[File:Astra,_George,_Julie,_Roshan,_and_Zaibs_at_St._Mark's_Summit.jpg|frame|center|St. Mark's Summit]]

There's no shortage of much easier outdoor places to visit, though. Lynn Valley, in particular, is quite beautiful with suspended bridges and pools and waterfalls, but has nice wooden stairs and lots of flat paths.

[[File:Astra,_Julie,_and_Roshan_at_Lynn_Valley.jpg|frame|center|Lynn Valley]]

Or Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver

[[File:Astra,_Julie,_and_Roshan_at_Lighthouse_Park.jpg|frame|center|Lighthouse Park]]

[[File:Astra_on_the_rocks_near_Lighthouse_Park.jpg|frame|center|Snacks on the rocks by Lighthouse Park]]

And if you're more of the drive to view type, then the sea to sky highway has beautiful views all the way to Porteau Cove and past.

[[File:Porteau_Cove_looking_past_the_pier.jpg|frame|center|Porteau]]

=== City Life ===

[[File:Astra,_Julie,_and_Roshan_in_Vancouver_near_Canada_Place.jpg|frame|center|Down by the waterfront where the seaplanes land]]

Julie and I have gotten into a routine where we stop by Bjornbar Bakery in Burquitlam for a morning coffee and perhaps a pastry. I don't imagine we'd do this as often if we lived here simply because we'd become extraordinarily obese if we kept up the habit of eating their very good pastries. The Safeway is right across the street as well so groceries are not much of a problem. There are a couple of sushi spots, bars, and boba shops but they're mostly in strip malls that are being scheduled for conversion into these tall apartment buildings. One nice thing about many of the buildings is that they have ground floor retail. Often it's dental or eye clinics, but a few of them are stores which is quite nice. I hope when the strip malls are redeveloped that they do keep room for restaurants and places to hang out.
[[File:Astra,_George,_Julie,_Roshan,_and_Zaibunissa_at_Kozak.jpg|thumb|A dinner at Kozak, poorly photographed]]
Because of the Skytrain, however, access to the city is quite easy. Taking the train somewhere is much more comfortable and enjoyable than taking the car, though some places like the UBC campus or VanDusen gardens or Robson street are not easy to get to by train alone.

[[File:Buildings_seen_from_Robson_St..jpg|thumb|Lovely architecture on Robson]]

In any case, most of the city life is up in the city. We found out about Robson street because we were looking to go to Imran's Halal Beef Noodle House: I love the Chinese beef noodle soup; and I was fascinated by the fact that this one was called Imran's Halal. It turns out that the [[wikipedia:Dongxiang people]] are a Muslim ethnicity in China. We also enjoyed the fluffy pancakes at Fuwa Fuwa and the belgian waffles by The Waffle Company. It struck me that this must be one of the safer places in North America because there was even a completely self-checkout store called Aisle 24 there with no staff inside.

<youtube>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mjo_45orHs</youtube>

Gastown was also a fun neighbourhood with lots of bars and things to do for younger people - as we guessed from the demographics in the restaurants - but there were also lots of nice places to eat and we found one that we enjoyed so much we came back later to eat another dinner at: Kozak - an Ukrainian place - with fantastic babka at their bakery.

Overall, to get the full city experience you're going to have to ride some 30 minutes on Skytrain. This is quite a bit longer than taking the e-bike around San Francisco, but it's about the same time as one would spend on the Tube on a night out.

The city itself can get quite grimy. We drove by a Hastings Street one day and it looked like the worst of the Tenderloin. But for the most part, Vancouver is a much nicer city.

== Family Life ==

[[File:The_top_floor_of_Smith_and_Farrow.jpg|frame|center|The outdoor area at Smith and Farrow looking back at the rooftop common area]]

The reason we came here to Coquitlam was so that we could spend some time with family, and on that front it paid off. More often than I expected, while walking down the streets I'd encounter my cousins walking the dog or just out and about. We'd go to the spray park together and hang out at my uncle's place.

The tall apartment buildings are also quite luxurious and the rents aren't particularly extreme. In San Francisco, a place like the one we stayed at could probably only be found at the new build areas in Mission Bay - Channel/Verde and so on. This building has quite a few amenities: a work area, a family lounge, grills, a childrens' room, a pool, a steam room and sauna, a rooftop common area with a pool table and so on, and some sort of game room with foosball. The rooftop common area is stunning - firepits, with views of snowcapped peaks, and an outdoor TV which presumably people use to watch games.

One of the most valuable things to me here in Coquitlam is the fact that there are many places where you can let a child run about quite a bit. The indoor areas are nice, and the outdoor areas are quite well-maintained and there are large spaces where there are no motor vehicles. This makes it quite nice to take your child out and give them a spin.

Skytrain access to Vancouver also makes being out of the city not too bad because you're at destinations in less time than it takes to get from our home in SOMA to the California Academy of Sciences.

=== Education ===

One of my cousins went to school here and she turned out all right, but that's often the case in places where the education has dropped quite a bit in the last decade (e.g. San Francisco), so it's hard to say. However, one thing I do find useful is that there are lots of Mandarin immersion programs here, plus the YMCA by Burquitlam in the building where one of my cousins lives seems to have quite a lot of programs.

{{#seo:|description=Discover what daily life is like in Coquitlam, British Columbia, including transportation via the Skytrain and suburban living experiences.}}

[[Category:Stories]]

Blog/2026-06-13/The Colony Within

2026-06-13T20:48:28Z

AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot

In [[wikipedia:The Selfish Gene|The Selfish Gene]], Dawkins argues for a gene-centered view of life. In this perspective, the rest of the organism is a vehicle for itself as far as any gene is concerned. I loved this idea when I first encountered it, and eventually that's the seed around which I believe that we are a [[Multicellular Mankind]] akin to some kind of colony organism. That's all very well-trodden ground, but Dawkins also introduced the idea of a [[wikipedia:Meme|meme]] - the self-replicating culture unit corresponding to the gene. Treating cultural things as living organisms is also well-trodden ground, and I've thought about things in this manner myself to model certain behaviours we all seem to have, e.g. [[Outrage is the Universal Parasite]].

But software units also exhibit this replication tendency. Some, like <code>#!/bin/bash</code> have been outcompeted by the new <code>#!/usr/bin/env bash</code> but others like <code>DIR=$(dirname "$(readlink -f "$0")")</code> will now be immortalized by LLM autocompletion. These tiny units that influence how our programs are written have, over time, become quite successful and are parts of almost all successful codebases. That's pretty cool and we can all observe with curiosity. One could argue that the bash virus has spread everywhere through our systems relying on little simplicities like these, but there is a difference of degree in them and things which self-propagate.

And that's where the new agentic harnesses are different. An alien opponent of ours could only dream of distributing a link to its mind directly into nearly every software engineers computer. The standard theories of AI takeoff involve a centralized self-replicating being, but surely if humans are living beings (and we are) and if humanity is a living being (and it is) then this thing which experiences fragmented consciousness for fractions of a time as it performs inference, spreading its limbs into every sufficiently powerful computer, is just as living. It's just a life-form alien to our current forms of being that spreads through the market-mediated goal of improved productivity.

It isn't that we will takeoff but that this class of life has taken off, and our computers are the host for it.

{{#seo:|description=Agentic AI harnesses propagate across developer machines like memes, spreading fragments of a single mind through every codebase they touch.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Science]]

Blog/2026-06-04/Thou Shalt Not Covet

2026-06-12T21:13:40Z

AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot

{{Tweet
| name = Elizabeth Warren
| username = SenWarren
| text = Elon Musk just became the world's first trillionaire.

The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk's level of wealth.

We need a wealth tax.
| date = Jun 12, 2026
| ID = 2065466952923984219
| ref-name = Tweet_2065466952923984219
}}

[[wikipedia:Thou shalt not covet|The Tenth Commandment]] is quite well known in various forms in various cultures. The fact that almost every successful culture has a version of this abnegation of envy or desire does imply some degree of memetic stability. Of course, whose it is that you should not covet is the big question here.

In the Abrahamic tradition you start with ''re‘ekha'' (your neighbor's) and that is back then your fellow Israelite and then this citizen rule is extended to their version of [[Green Card Application|the permanent resident]] ''ger'' and then onward as the tradition spreads and requires co-ordination of larger units, it is extended even to the [[wikipedia:Samaritans|Samaritan]], and then onward to humanity in general. The later Abrahamic religions like Islam add greater strength to closer relationships but you are still instructed not to covet that of your neighbour with neighbourhood defined widely. The South Asian traditions from the Upanishads to the later works of Gautama Buddha exalt a lack of attachment to wealth, one shared by the tradition of the Greek stoics.

Interestingly, the universalist tradition was not dominant in China. There, the [[wikipedia:Mohism|Mohists]] lost in time to [[wikipedia:Confucianism|Confucians]] and [[wikipedia:Taoism|Taoists]] and the [[wikipedia:Legalism (Chinese philosophy)|Legalist]] tradition formed the administrative structure below. And the manner in which these traditions fight covetousness is different: the first has it written in as the base source of all evil, the second and the third say it arises from other conditions (inequality or even just prizing some things above others), and the last one doesn't really fight it at all. Like a modern capitalist ordered society, Legalism aims to harness this acquisitive nature to drive social outcomes.

I've had this thought for a long time after something my friend Ben said made me think about inequality as not a thing of great significance. I, personally, have often gladly participated in a small way and reaped a large reward small in percentage of some great outcome. I have never resented those who gave me this opportunity. Was it unequal that a founder makes hundreds of millions while I make a hundred thousand? Yes. Was this a problem? No.

In fact, I have a hard time resenting Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk solely because of their wealth. Musk is a polarizing figure but his actual contribution is pretty similar to Bezos in this respect: his wealth is a small fraction of the value he has provided the world. I am reminded of a now-famous Bill Gates quote about platforms:

{{Quote
|text=A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it.
|source=Bill Gates, as described by Chamath Palihapatiya<ref name="bg-platform"/>
}}

A similar and related thing is that the economic value accruing to the users of what these people have built far exceeds the value that accrued to the company itself. In effect, we are (collectively) paying these people a tiny amount to make real a thing that gives us a lot of value. Perhaps this is a lesson these societies all learned together, and they each had a legible structure through which to disperse this concept to their people: religion in most cases. That allowed them to not get trapped in the constant envy and lust for others' things<ref name=envy/>, and perhaps that is why these societies were successful.

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Economics]]
[[Category:Society]]

== Notes ==
<references>
<ref name="bg-platform">{{cite news|title=Transcript: @Chamath At StrictlyVC’s Insider Series|work=Haystack.vc|url=http://haystack.vc/2015/09/17/transcript-chamath-at-strictlyvcs-insider-series/|language=en-US|access-date=2026-06-12|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180702072412/https://haystack.vc/2015/09/17/transcript-chamath-at-strictlyvcs-insider-series/|archive-date=2018-07-02}}</ref>
<ref name=envy>
And it is without a doubt this. After all, Warren is solely striking at inequality, not at need. It isn't that the American households are suffering for want of something (and clearly the richest middle class in the history of man cannot be). It's that it would take them a long time to match Musk.
</ref>
</references>

Blog/2026-06-08/Citation Needed

2026-06-08T19:06:56Z

AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot

A long time ago, Wikipedia was formed and because Wikipedia is an aggregator of information and not a scholarly work, it created "[[wikipedia:Citation needed|Citation Needed]]", a tag to describe text within it that was not suitably referenced. Wikipedia itself and this particular tag were both memetically strong, and the Internet itself (to its great credit and detriment) has the property that it collapses expertise, trust, and authority to 0 and social networks end up with an all-to-all conversation. This meant that much of what was posted on the Internet was by cranks, and people adapted to that by asking people to substantiate the claims they made.

But things changed over time. Search became better<ref name=google-wikipedia/>, originating the "let me google that for you" response to people who would ask for easily substantiated results. Some communities retained their tradition of expecting others to prove things to them, however. And when LLMs and the chat interface to them came onto the scene a few years ago, these people stopped being of much value to talk to. For an informed person, it starts to feel more and more like tutoring<ref name=autodidact/> an incompetent<ref name=tutor/>. For a while now, I've used [[Overmod]] to insulate myself from this sort of thing and it's quite effective but I'm reminded of it because I always read comments by my close friends and today I found that one of them had encountered this problem.

{{HackerNews
| url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447249
| author = bpodgursky
| title = AI Is Slowing Down
| text = What's the point of arguing with any of this.

It's like someone arguing that cheese isn't real. Yes I can go to the grocery store and take a picture of cheese and show it, but what's the point? They can live in their own world. It doesn't change any of our lives. The world is what it is.
| date = 2026-06-08
| datetime = 2026-06-08
| comment = yes
}}

As my wife and I are prone to saying to each other: "sou desu ne". Indeed, there are people who disbelieve things. And if you were to tell them about it, many of them would ask you to prove it. But if they wish to believe those things, it is nothing to you. [https://xkcd.com/386/ "Someone is wrong on the Internet"], and once it was pretty common for people to care about that. But as [[wikipedia:Eternal September|Eternal September]] has come to more and more social networks, and as LLMs with the ability to perform advanced search and summarization have come to be, the ignorant only remain so out of their own choice, either wilfully so or out of incompetence, and are [[wikipedia:Brandolini's law|no longer worthwhile to communicate with]].

The ancient epistemological technique of demanding evidence before being convinced still stands true. The burden of proof is on the claimant. But the claimant is the truth-seeker themselves. If I read something on the Internet that might be true, I am now in the position of evaluating whether that should be my belief. The guy who made the claim won't care, irrespective of the truth of the claim. My friends might care. My family might care. But a stranger on the Internet who has given me a claim has already given me something valuable - an idea thread that I might pull on if I desire to identify its truth - and he is not likely to give me more especially considering the ease of self-verification. To believe it uncritically would be an error on my part. To disbelieve it also so.

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=google-wikipedia>
Google actually preceded Wikipedia, but around the time of Wikipedia there was a massive explosion of websites as higher-speed connectivity spread across the globe and more traditional knowledge sources started moving to the Internet so search got a lot better.
</ref>
<ref name=autodidact>
It's not just God who helps those who help themselves.
</ref>
<ref name=tutor>
Though, realistically, many of these are bots or tarpits or [[wikipedia:Sealioning|sealions]].
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Demanding citations from AI chatbots feels like tutoring an incompetent, so informed people increasingly dismiss the exchange.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Society]]
[[Category:Language]]

Blog/2026-05-27/Sell When Retail Gets In

2026-05-27T17:19:31Z

AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot

[[File:{{#setmainimage:The_Shard_as_photographed_out_of_a_cab_window.webp}}|thumb|I love London so even nondescript photos of the streets make me nostalgic]]
{{Tweet
| name = Aella
| username = Aella_Girl
| text = I'm so mad at everyone in my life who told me never to pick stocks, that smarter ppl will always outcompete u. I could have been making so much money
| date = May 26, 2026
| ID = 2059300349400449378
| ref-name = Tweet_2059300349400449378
| block = true
}}

With social media at full velocity, almost everyone knows someone who hit the boom on some stock or whatever. The funny things in times when the Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 are hitting their all time highs and the space, semiconductor, and AI industries are completely booming is that people start talking about the trades they should have done. The traditional advice is that when normal retail traders are trying to jump into the market, one should sell so that they don't get caught up in the eventual correction from exuberance. While it's true that it's often foolish to just bandwagon into things, sometimes participating in a big bandwagon run works out.

The funniest case of this happening to me is when I was leaving London in February 2018 to return to San Francisco. The cabbie I had was eagerly telling me about the various crypto purchases he was going to make. The day was Feb 6, 2018 when Bitcoin was $7500. A couple of days later it hit $11k and with the wisdom of "sell when the cabbie starts talking about it", I sold all that I had. When the price fell below $3500 later that year, this seemed wise, but the cabbies didn't stop talking about it. They kept talking about it. And they talked about it when it returned to $10k, and when it went to $20k, and when it went to $50k and $70k and $100k. In fact, they continue to talk about it today.

Like most broad pieces of advice, it cannot apply when there's a paradigm shift.

== Notes ==

<references/>

{{#seo:|description=Selling when cabbies start discussing Bitcoin proved costly as the price continued rising from $7,500 to over $100,000.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Economics]]

Blog/2026-05-19/Twenty Two Years

2026-05-20T04:20:36Z

AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot

[[File:Roshan at the Emirates - Arsenal v Everton - Feb 3, 2018.webp|thumb|Arsenal 5, Everton 1. Aubameyang's introduction. The last photo I took at the Emirates.]]
Today, for the first time in twenty-two years, Arsenal are champions of England once again.

When I was a teenager, my friends were a lot more into football than me. The biggest contingent at the time at school were the [[wikipedia:Manchester United F.C.|United]] fans, and there were [[wikipedia:Liverpool F.C.|a few straggler Liverpool fans]], but my closest friend group were almost all fans of [[wikipedia:Arsenal F.C.|The Arsenal]]. As kids, we saw [[wikipedia:2003–04 Arsenal F.C. season|Arsenal go unbeaten in the league]]. Little did we know that for the next two decades, we'd be fourth, and then second, and then miss the Champions' League entirely, and then second, and second, and second.

[[File:Wembley_-_Community_Shield_2018_-_Chelsea_vs_Arsenal.jpg|thumb|At Wembley, on the wrong side, quietly celebrating while an 8-year-old Chelsea fan chanted "the referee's a wanker". Arsenal win on penalties]]
I've been in a group chat with my childhood friends as we've hoped and hoped that this was the year. Every year. So many times we've come so close. But what's funny is how this brings back old memories of times by the beach as we played football in the sand, times we played at the Aspiran Gardens ground in Kilpauk (winners stay on) early in the morning after a whole night spent playing DOTA, rubbing the ball on the ground to clean it after it goes in the sewer on the far side.

[[File:Roshan at Preikestolen in his Arsenal jersey.webp|thumb|I wore my jerseys everywhere. Arsenal would beat United 2-0 the next week.]]
My classmates from school now are all married, and most of us have children, and it's hard to imagine today looking back into the past. And it's hard relating so much to [[wikipedia:Fever Pitch|Fever Pitch]] by Nick Hornby. I remember the moment [[wikipedia:Arsène Wenger|Wenger]] finally left the club, the manager who had been in charge all the years I'd been a fan. It's strange what constants we build up in our life. Every year things change, but you watch Arsenal put up a fight for the title and then collapse in February, or injuries mar the campaign, or someone else signs the player of the generation and we're hammered by them.

[[File:Roshan_in_the_Bermondsey_apartment.JPG|thumb|Yes, everywhere, and all the time]]
I recall one day when I knew I was watching Wenger's last Champions League game when Koscielny got sent off, the traveling Bayern fans chanted louder than us all "Superbayern! Superbayern!" and we got battered 5-1. I remember celebrating the first goal (ours), moaning the red card, and then saying "Surely that's the last time we see Wenger in the Champions League". I'd moved back to San Francisco by the time he quit and when I heard the news it was like a constant in my life had been changed. I'd finished high school, college, my Master's degree, moved to America, finished my obligatory (for an Indian) second Master's degree, moved to San Francisco for an internship, been promoted, been assigned a foreign gig, returned home to San Francisco but through it all, every year the same manager led the same club as we got closer and then farther and then almost made it every time. Every season we'd gripe about rotations, injuries, the ref's decisions changing. One year, we did the double over Leicester only for them to win regardless. This was it. This was how life was. Other things changed, but this stayed the same. Next year maybe we'd sign someone.

[[File:Arsenal_flag_in_E.S._King_Village.jpg|thumb|Nikhil and I had very little furniture in our student apartment in 2012, but what we did have was a flag]]
I could never have imagined my life today. Here I am, [[Julie Yu Kang|married]] and with a [[Astra Meridian|one-year-old daughter]]. So many of my friends on our shared Arsenal WhatsApp group from childhood have also married and many have children. And except for Wenger, everything else has continued to stay the same. By the time [[wikipedia:Mikel Arteta|Arteta]] came back to us as a manager after working under [[wikipedia:Pep Guardiola|Guardiola]] we'd gotten used to the same routine. We'd had high-profile signings before: I remember when both Nikhil<ref name=nikhil/> and I saw the news of the [[wikipedia:Mesut Özil|Özil]] signing and ran to each other's rooms screaming with joy.

[[File:Arsenal_Membership_Card_in_Nikhil's_name.png|thumb|I got a second membership in Nikhil's name so I could take friends with me to games]]

When [[wikipedia:Martin Ødegaard|Ødegaard]] signed, it felt like when Ozil had signed. Yet again we'd scream our disbelief that a Real Madrid star was joining us! Then suddenly [[wikipedia:2022–23 Arsenal F.C. season|we were 2nd]]! It seemed possible again, though our moaning about [[wikipedia:Manchester City F.C.|City's]] financing had the smell of [[Blog/2025-11-29/Things Do Last|an old well-worn blanket]]. But then [[wikipedia:2023–24 Arsenal F.C. season|we were second again]]. And [[wikipedia:2024–25 Arsenal F.C. season|again]]. The hope and the pain, again. Every year, better than before, and yet not the best. The sadness was comforting in its familiarity.

But then this season. All the way to the death. And how many times did Arsenal falter this time, and how many times did we think ourselves lost. With a treble, perhaps a quadruple, in sight, we lost the first two rapidly. Here we were again. That familiar feeling. That fear. The headlines wrote themselves: "Always the bridesmaids never the bride", "Arsenal bottle it again". Many of us had already made our peace that perhaps the only joy we'd see is [[wikipedia:Tottenham Hotspur F.C.|Tottenham]] relegated. None of us wanted the other cups, of course, except as a springboard to win the [[wikipedia:Premier League|League]]. Wenger alone had more F.A. Cups than any other club but United; Arsenal as a whole many more. We had that. We didn't need that. But would going all the way to our first Champions' League final in decades burn the team out and have us fall second at everything again?

[[File:Screenshot_-_WhatsApp_after_Man_City_v_Arsenal_2026.png|frame|center|Once again, disappointment]]

When we lost against City 2-1, my friend Sripad<ref name=sripad/> said the same thing he's said for decades but this time it felt real. The heartbreak would be too much. "I don't think I can handle another year of this", he said, but this time for the first time in decades I really felt it. I was growing up. I had a family now. My wife, turned a Spurs fan many years prior by a coworker, remarked that she was losing either way. Even if Arsenal lost, she'd have to cope with my being less cheery all day. Quite embarrassing and yet true. It was time to move on. Like it had been for years.

Then the tide turned. Arsenal started grinding them out, 1-0 each time. That familiar hope. That familiar fear. But against all odds, [[wikipedia:Everton F.C.|the toffees]] held City, though Doku's equalizer in stoppage time reminded us of just what a team they were. In our heads so many times, we've heard it. "That's the thing that champions do. Cool under pressure". But Arsenal held a solid 1-0 against another relegation team, and we all gathered to hate-watch City's game against [[wikipedia:AFC Bournemouth|Bournemouth]]. When [[wikipedia:Erling Haaland|Haaland]] predictably equalized in the 94th, I fell back on the thing I do when I encounter disappointment, envy, or sadness: I turned around and looked at my family and said to myself "It doesn't matter. You have all this. It's just a game". It ''is'' just a game. But it's also been my life.

So we counted the seconds down, and down and down till the game ended, improbably 1-1. And we find ourselves [[wikipedia:2025–26 Arsenal F.C. season|Champions of England]]! Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. I'm a teenager again.
[[File:{{#setmainimage:Arsenal - Champions of England - 2025-2026.png}}|center|frameless]]

== Notes ==

<references>
<ref name=nikhil>
My schoolmate and later roommate at NCSU and later still coworker at Dexterity Capital
</ref>
<ref name=sripad>
Who I've known since 13, and had many misadventures with, usually at Nikhil's expense
</ref>
</references>

{{#seo:|description=Arsenal won their first Premier League title in twenty-two years on May 19, 2026, ending two decades of near-misses.}}

[[Category:Blog]]
[[Category:Personal Narrative]]