Good Tokens 2025-10-24

Worth your time

The Alpha Terrace Historic District in Pittsburgh, PA. One of my dream places to live.

My guilty pleasure on YouTube right now are videos claiming Ancient Egyptians had access to advanced technology that allowed them to machine vases out of hard stone. I’m agnostic as to whether or not this is true, but I can’t look away! A second thing that makes these videos delightful is that they all pit themselves against mainstream archeology which just cracks me up. Who are these mainstream archeologists? What are they doing to hinder this message? I see the evidence for advanced manufacturing but these mainstream archeologists seem like a mythical species.

On seriousness.

Why is Switzerland so rich? This is good, but I think it misses a couple of things. First, Switzerland was spared the physical and human losses of both World Wars. Second, there’s a cultural element that the post doesn’t speak to. Switzerland is both highly individualistic and highly communal, a mix of live-and-let-live and we’re-all-in-this-together that I believe allows it to make more pragmatic decisions, the benefits of which compound over time.

Some of the strongest US-China copium I’ve ever seen.

Creating a village for your child. I wish it were easier to do this.

What happens when someone dies on an airplane. Via Uri.

Things I learned

11 states and half of the counties in the US have more senior citizens than children. This sounds outrageous but I’m curious how much this has changed over time and the degree to which this is just more about longer life spans. Someone should analyze this the way Brian Potter analyzed US pedestrian deaths.

Costco’s Kirkland Brand drives more revenue than all of Procter and Gamble combined.

One of the great joys of having children is that they ask obvious questions you haven’t considered. This week it was: “Why do we call it a piggy bank?” ¹ It turns out that this (possibly) comes from the name of the clay, pygg, that was used to make jars for storing coins and that shaping them like pigs was a visual pun.

Support for declaring the United States a Christian nation is falling amongst Christians.

Musings

Someone told me this week that in France they say that there are six reasons someone will pay for something: Security, Pride, Novelty, Comfort, Money, Friendliness.

LLM corner

The Tiny Teams Playbook. This rhymes with some of what I learned this summer while “interning” with Roo Code. See also prototype first development.

Dead Framework Theory - the idea that LLMs are freezing frameworks like React into the internet. I thought like this at first, but I no longer think that this is true and I actually think LLMs will make it easier to bootstrap new frameworks provided those frameworks have real advantages over what they’re replacing because LLMs make it so much easier to adopt new tools.

Peter Steinberger’s Agentic Coding Guide.

Living Dangerously with Claude.

2025-10-23