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Good tokens 2025-04-25

2025-04-25

Worth your time

New York State of Mind

I love Chris Ryan

Chris Ryan on The Press Box talking about the early blogosphere. Three things I loved about this:

  1. Chris’s natural creative energy
  2. What it was like for Chris when he didn’t know how his career would turn out
  3. Chris’s blog gave Free Darko its name 🤯

Things Brian Potter has learned

Number 30 was my favorite:

Whenever there’s a major bridge incident in the US we hear stories about the US’s crumbling infrastructure, but the worst bridges in the US are steadily getting fixed. Between 1992 and 2023, the number of US bridges in critical condition declined by more than 70%.

Read the whole list here.

AI bottlenecks

An exploration on where the value from AI will come from that also starts to articulate specific bottlenecks that (currently) AI faces in improving R&D work. Somewhat related to my reaction to Situational Awareness, I suspect that more of these bottlenecks exist than people think. Coding might be a unique application for LLMs: relatively closed loop, fast feedback, lower diversity of tasks.

Musings

Too online

From No Honor Among Mutuals:

Self-importance, contempt, and arrogance is rewarded online. Virtue rarely is. In this way, technology is inverting many of the incentives for developing character.

Bias hacking for progress?

“Once you put that first stake in, they’ll never make you pull it up.” — Robert Moses, from The Power Broker.

I’ve seen this same dynamic in all sorts of projects. Creating the impression that it is happening unlocks funding that is unavailable before it has begun. It occurs to me that this is a way of hacking peoples sunk cost bias to get things done.

Chattanooga travel notes

2025-04-22

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I’ve been hearing whispers in the parents-of-young-children circles about Chattanooga since we moved back to the Atlanta area 3 years ago.

We would discuss family friendly travel destinations and Chattanooga would come up, but I never really got it. What’s in Chattanooga?

They’d say things like “they’ve got the Chattanooga Choo Choo” or “there’s a great aquarium”. My children like a train and some fish as much as anyone’s, but I struggled to see what would make this worth the 2 hour drive.

This spring break, we finally went for it, and now I get it. It’s a beautiful, accessible city with a ton of options for things to do with children under 5. Not many of those things are unique to Chattanooga per se, but I’m not sure how much that matters at this stage.

The city itself

I have to say, I was surprised and more than a little bit charmed. The city itself is like a combination of Pittsburgh and Raleigh. The downtown urban core clearly came of age in the ~1880s to ~1920s and was formerly industrial. There’s a ridge above the city and a river that runs through it. It’s small. You could walk across it in an hour or two, even with a stroller.

The city is clearly prioritizing tourism. There’s a free electric bus that connects the city and makes it easy to get around (and for children the age mine are, it is an activity in an of itself). It’s clean and well marked. The aquarium and children’s museum are new and have a lot of local support. There’s a hint of Disney World about it, but it’s fun (to be fair, the North Shore neighborhood seemed a lot more vibrant, like people actually live there).

Things to do

  • The Chattanooga Choo Choo, a classic steam engine in the old train station that kids can climb up on and play in. Things I learned: Chattanooga’s claim to fame is that it connected the Northern and Southern railway systems in the 1880s.

  • There’s a great aquarium, at least as good as Atlanta or Monterrey Bay.

  • Great parks — Coolidge Park was my favorite. It’s got fountains and a carousel. It used to be that you could walk from the Riverfront (where the aquarium is) to the North Shore (where Coolidge Park is) but that’s currently closed for renovations.

  • Rock City is just outside of town. This is probably the most unique Chattanooga thing that we saw. It’s tough to describe, but worth it. Plenty to see and do — and an incredible view of the valley.

  • Children’s museum. Is it just me, or have these gotten way better since I was a kid? Basically everywhere I travel with my kids has one (Pittsburgh, Hendersonville, apparently Chattanooga). Do they actually exist year round or are they pop ups that get set up when I book a trip?

Musings

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Walking through the beautiful old train station made me a little bit sad. It’s a gorgeous building that clearly isn’t being maintained. It’s an elegant building with a sense of place, but the big central corridor is just empty. It reminded me of Buenos Aires: all those beautiful buildings slowly falling into disrepair.

This sadness seeped into the rest of the trip. Chattanooga is clearly doing great. There’s a lot of investment in downtown. It’s safe and clean. Many of the restaurants and stores are obviously new. My family will definitely go back.

And yet, I couldn’t help but noticing a lot of empty storefronts. Not enough to detract from the experience and all well maintained. But one in four, in some places as many one in two are empty.

Observing this in the background of Liberation Day and all the discourse that followed had me wondering: how prosperous can a city be if it is only a tourist destination, rather than a place that people live and create?

Good tokens 2025-04-18

2025-04-18

New around here

If you want to get my posts via email, now you can: jdilla.xyz/subscribe.

Things I learned

The air dinosaurs breathed had more oxygen in it than the air we breathe. Jurassic Park couldn’t have happened because the dinosaurs would asphyxiate. Via Lyman Stone.

The combined number of hidden Christians in China and India is estimated to be 120 million, large enough to be the fifth largest religion in the world. Via Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Worth your time

  1. “A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum.” — Donald Knuth via Mark Larson.

  2. From Stay Sassy:

I noticed that many parents of young children, despite having significantly more on their plates, seemed to get burnt out less. I even noticed this in myself, and didn’t have a real way to explain it – my first kid’s birth coincided with the busiest working period of my life (do not recommend), but I found that I had a more positive attitude towards work, for no reason that I could really explain. When I read this post, it all clicked – when you have young children Mission Doubt entirely disappears because you need to feed them.

I have also noticed that having a baby in the house is good for my creativity and relationship to my work. While I have less time for work, what I get out of that time is much, much higher quality.

  1. What’s behind the SynBio Bust? by Sarah Constantin

  2. Risk of Ruin Goods by Uri Bram

  3. Molson Hart on how tariffs and manufacturing in the USA: part 1 and part 2

  4. How restricting car traffic changed air pollution in Paris

  5. The myth of the infrastructure phase. Applications and the infrastructure to power them are built in tandem.

  6. There’s no speed limit.

Musings

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard Feynman

Good tokens 2025-04-03

2025-04-04

Some shameless self promotion

Apollo by James Edward Dillard.

Worth your time

  1. Good conversations have door knobs.
  2. David Burns on relationships and blame on the Clearer Thinking Podcast. This one was great.
  3. The potency of jokes by Ian Leslie
  4. Torpedo bats are taking Major League Baseball by storm. Yet another reminder that the efficient market hypothesis is a lie. We experiment less than we should.
  5. How silica gel took over the world. I need to start compiling a list of these stories about how materials are adopted.

Things I learned

  1. Paul Skenes makes history
  2. Half of recorded history came before the Old Testament — the Literature and History Podcast
  3. Facts about mushrooms:
  4. A single fungal organism can ~live for thousands of years~ and ~span over miles~. Their vast underground webs are largely invisible to us but ~communicate impossibly complex information~ we barely know how to decode. They are among the oldest life forms on earth, ~predating plants by more than 300 million years~.

Good Tokens 2025-03-21

2025-03-21

Worth your time

The making of Richard Scarry. Cars and Trucks and Things That Go has been the book of the year in my house, so I loved this behind the scenes look at how the book and its author came to be. Even better that much of it was written in my beloved Switzerland.

Let their be more biographies of failure by Henry Oliver

So what are the lessons we can learn? It doesn’t always help to be right. Ideas aren’t easy to implement without the right combination of technology, attitudes, and luck. The work is what’s important, not the result. Maybe the cranks who fill their houses with cart loads of ephemera aren’t so crazy. Don’t make political trouble. Get a PR department. Have a partner who can do these things if you can’t. Be in the right place at the right time. Don’t get cynical, or as Churchill said, don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep working. Philosophical and ethical beliefs matter a lot to what work you do and how you do it. Don’t be so pragmatic you end up being a conformist. Conventional schooling isn’t always the best approach for your children. Worry less about imaginative young people becoming lawyers. Being bored might give them the opportunity they need to have their big idea.

A great critique of Seeing like a State from Slate Star Codex. I’m like 1/3 of the way through the book and fully buying Scott’s arguments. Now I feel like someone has revealed the magicians trick.

A way to think about which jobs are most likely to be automated by AI: time horizons, legibility, humanity, and trust.

The model is the product. I’m not sure this is correct but the hypothesis is clear and it made me think. I’m not sure I’m ready to bet against generalist scaling, but this was a compelling case that specialized models effectively are the application layer for AI.

Things I learned

Cars have pop up ads now.

The importance of serendipitous meetings: Silicon Valley companies will cross reference each other’s patents more when their employees frequent the same coffee shops. I’m reminded here of Austin’s 3 types of luck and the fact that serendipity can be encouraged.

Musings

All innovation (particularly social innovation) should be presented as a return to tradition.