It's moments like these when I wish I was reading books in a book club or an English class so I would be able to complain about them to other people. Instead I have you!
This is the most divided I’ve felt about a book in the past 10 years (since A Little Life).
There is some absolutely intoxicating writing in this book. There are characters and scenes that I will probably never forget. The hint of a mystical evil lurking in the background is so well done.
At the same time, this book is sprawling to the point of distraction. I almost quit this book on multiple occasions because I had grown so interested in parts of the story just to be dropped in another location and time to start over again. To the authors credit, the final portion of the book does make an effort to tie the threads of the story together but so much is left disconnected.
It reminds me of Michelangelo’s Slaves. Obviously the work of a master… and yet unfinished.
This edition of Good Tokens is best enjoyed while listening to the Phil Collins version of You Can't Hurry Love.
Shameless Self Promotion
Introducing AgentCAD: About a month ago I became obsessed with the idea of a command line tool for creating CAD drawings as a way to empower coding agents (Claude, Codex, etc) to be better at designing 3D objects. The first version of it is here and I'd be lying if I didn't say I had a delightful time building it. Try it out by firing up your favorite coding agent, grabbing the starter prompt from here, and giving it something to design for you. You and your agent can send me feedback directly from the CLI app or email me here: hello@jdilla.xyz
Dangerously Skip Permissions: In other command line news, my friend Rami, the head of Product for Stripe's new command line product Projects.dev stopped by Dangerously Skip Permissions to talk about CLI tools and what it's like to be a PM in the age of AI. If you need any more reason to check it out, Rami is one of the 5 best PMs I've witnessed up close. Full episode is here or a taster is here.
The Kranz Dictum: If this one doesn't get you going, please have someone check your pulse because you might be dead.
The Creation of Instant Coffee I always love a good "how X came to be" piece. I was surprised by how many of these chemical processes I recognized from my time at Macro Oceans.
Rented Virtue The connection between culture and value creation is underrated. So are the Quakers!
There's only one European company more valuable than Home Depot, which is itself only the number-four American retail company.
During Pangea, whole sections of the earth went without rain for thousands of years. The megamonsoon cut off the interior from atmospheric moisture for stretches of geological time.
Consumers aged 55+ now drive 45.3% of all U.S. spending (Unusual Whales).
Musings
"Such is the blindness of men, that they even glory in their blindness." — Augustine
"The life of man is like a game with dice; if you don't get the throw you want, you must show your skill in making the best of the throw you get." — Terence. Literature and History continues to delight me.
Agentalent.ai: A marketplace where companies hire verified, human-supervised AI agents. Each agent has a human handler. It's like a staffing agency for AI. The future is weird and it's already here.
ElevenLabs Secures AI Agent Insurance: First AIUC-1-backed insurance policy covering AI voice agents. They passed 5,000+ adversarial simulations to get it. This is a big deal for enterprise adoption — insuring against hallucinations and unauthorized actions is the kind of boring infrastructure that actually unlocks deployment.
Over the past several months, I've been collaborating with a friend of mine, Dr. Dua Hassan on her podcast.
One of the things that I think is underrated about being a parent is the degree to which medical stuff with your children just happens to you. Even the planned stuff — the 6 month and 1 year appointments — inevitably happens on a day when you're tired or distracted and there's less time, attention, and energy to get much beyond "What" and into "Why".
The first season is all about the first 24 hours of life and the shots, tests, and eye goop that are applied to a baby right after it's born. I've been through this three times and recognized every step — but couldn't have told you much about them until this show.
You can find it on Spotify here or on YouTube here. Send it to a parent or soon-to-be parent you love!
Craft is the Antidote to Slop — Will Manidis is in my internet top 5. I hope I'm not insulting him when I say he has great taste (link: https://minutes.substack.com/p/against-taste)
Papua New Guinea, with about 0.1 percent of the world's population, hosts more than 10 percent of the world's languages. Sweden maintains such accurate daily birth-and-death counts that it no longer needs to conduct a census. That whole piece on fake population numbers is wild.
The IKEA effect: people place disproportionately high value on things they partially created.
Tigers are orange because their prey can't distinguish between orange and green — and green pigment is hard to produce biologically. Evolution is full of these "good enough" solutions.
Alpha-Bots — Consistently one of my kids' favorite toys. Most likely to get the 3 and 5 year old playing together for 20+ minutes at a time while I'm not in the room.
No Knead Bread — My friend Chris introduced me to this No Knead Bread recipe late last year and it has quickly become a part of my family's weekly routine. Who knew fresh bread could be this easy?
I keep this blog mostly for myself, as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity and creativity. I’m flattered that a small group of people (with impeccable taste!) visit it or have decided to subscribe, but I’m clear-eyed enough to know it’s not the most important place on the internet. When traffic spikes, I almost always know why. When someone signs up, I usually know who they are.
Until recently.
At some point in the past several months, I started to see a lot of traffic from China, Singapore, and, occasionally, Iran (I noticed this on HeyRecap, which uses AI to cover the local governments here in Georgia, as well).
I didn’t think a whole lot of it. There’s a lot of LLM / bot traffic on the web these days and I make my site pretty easy to access. I figure if I’m going to spend my time doing this, I should at least be a part of the training data set. Perhaps the SuperAI will be friendly to me!
But this week something else happened. I started to see a bunch of new email subscriptions come in, all about one after the other. All people of these people used their business email addresses. I can find most of them on LinkedIn. They seem to be real people… except I have no connection to any of them. They live in places and work on things I have no connection to. Some of them are probably reading this now (👋).
I guess it’s possible that these people really have found my site and decided that they want emails from it. If this is the case, welcome. I’m glad you’re here!
However, I suspect that this is actually bot traffic? Here is what I think was happening:
Bots were putting in email addresses in my subscribe form
This kicks off a verification email to their email address
Their corporate email scanner clicks on each link in the email, which shows up to my site as a verified subscriber — all the subscribers I didn’t recognize were corporate email addresses
But this is kind of crazy — that means that there are bots out there putting real email addresses of real people with jobs into blogs as small and insignificant as mine. What? I guess this is the world we’re headed towards but I didn’t expect it to find me so soon.
If you have gotten this email and you don’t want it, please hit the unsubscribe button and kindly accept my apologies. Thanks to friend of the blog Graham for encouraging me to write about this.
