Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

On wintering. - Westenberg

2026-04-29T01:54:43.000Z

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Abraham Lincoln rode home from Washington in December 1849, with what looked like the end of his career packed into his luggage. He'd served one term in the House, alienated his constituents by opposing the Mexican War, and lost his shot at a federal Land Office appointment.

He went back to Springfield to practice law, a near-broken man. And, for nearly 5 years, he barely participated in national politics.

He rode the Illinois circuit, argued patent disputes, and taught himself geometry from Euclid by candlelight in coach inns. He read newspapers obsessively; he read Shakespeare and the King James Bible until he could quote either from pretty much any starting point.

The folks who saw him in those years said he looked...tired.

When he returned to the spotlight, in October 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had cracked the country open. Lincoln walked onto the stage at Peoria and spoke for 3 hours straight. The man who'd been a country lawyer that morning was a national figure by midnight.

Six years later, he was president.

Lincoln's lost years are the part of the biography American children skip past in school; they get the rail-splitter, the beard, the debates, the war, the emancipation, the address, the assassination.

But the 5 years we skip over are the whole ballgame.

They rebuilt the instrument.

The English writer Katherine May coined the modern usage in her 2020 book Wintering, but the idea is older than the word. Russian peasants called the long quiet stretches between harvests zima and treated them as a season for weaving, sleeping, repairing tools, and telling stories. Japanese Buddhist monasteries built whole liturgies around rohatsu sesshin, the seven-day winter retreat that closes the year. Foragers like the !Kung and the Hadza, spent something like 4 hours a day on subsistence and the rest on…rest.

Productivity is a recent invention; wintering is not.

Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian in 1985 to a shrugging response. The New York Times reviewed it in a single column. He'd been writing in El Paso for years, broke and largely forgotten. Friends thought he'd peaked. Then in 1992 All the Pretty Horses came out, won the National Book Award, sold half a million copies, and the back catalog got reissued. McCarthy hadn't been recovering. He'd been finishing something the culture wasn't ready for in 1985 and was ready for by 1992.

He'd been wintering.

Daniel Day-Lewis stopped acting in 1997 and apprenticed as a cobbler in Florence. He came back, played Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, and won an Oscar. He stopped again. Came back. Won another Oscar. Stopped again, and by all reports has actually stopped this time, though I wouldn't bet on it. The cobbler years were how he reset the instrument.

In the long winter, organisms route metabolism inward.

Trees pull resources out of leaves, drop the leaves, and push the sugars down into root systems. Bears don't sleep, exactly. Their core temperature drops a few degrees, their metabolism halves, and they cycle slowly through fat reserves while their kidneys learn to recycle urea into protein. They come out in spring with their bones still mineralized and their muscles roughly intact, which is something no human has yet figured out how to do. What the bear performs is one of the most metabolically sophisticated tricks in the animal kingdom.

The Romans understood that a field left fallow for a season produced more in the next cycle than one worked continuously. Norfolk farmers in the 18th century made it a four-course rotation: wheat, turnips, barley, clover, with the clover restoring nitrogen the wheat had pulled out. The land that looks unused is doing the most useful work.

People who winter well are doing something analogous. They route attention inward and downward, into the parts of the system that don't show up on the surface. They read, they revise, they take long walks they can't account for, and they think the same thought 400 times until it cracks.

Most of what gets published, shipped, posted, and announced is washed off the rocks within a quarter. The people doing it are running on a treadmill that resets their position to zero every Monday. They have to keep producing to stay visible, and visibility is how they earn the right to keep producing.

It's a closed loop, and it generates very little compound interest.

The winterer is off the loop. They aren't maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain.

In the short term, you pay dearly for it.

People forget you exist. Calls dry up. Old collaborators stop replying. Younger versions of you lap you in the standings.

The benefit is that you can do work that takes longer than a quarter, and longer than a year, and longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.

Charles Darwin came back from the Beagle voyage in 1836 with the rough outline of natural selection in his head. He published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The intervening 23 years included long stretches when he wrote almost nothing in his theory notebooks, partly because he was sick, partly because he was writing 8 volumes about barnacles, and partly because he understood the case had to be airtight. When he finally published, the argument was so heavily fortified that the church spent the next 50 years trying to find a hairline crack and failing.

If Darwin had published in 1840, he might be a footnote. His 23 years of comparative silence were the moat.

Robert Caro started his Lyndon Johnson biography in 1976. He's published 4 volumes of an intended 5. He's now 90. He moved to the Texas Hill Country to live among the people Johnson grew up with, because he thought he couldn't write about a man without inhabiting his weather. Each volume took roughly a decade. The publishing world treats him as a slow eccentric. Anyone who's read the books knows he's running a different clock, on a different scale, and that no one currently working at speed is going to produce anything close.

Plenty of people stop and produce nothing. The graveyard of failed comebacks is large, and wintering is dangerous as a strategy because most attempts at it collapse into actual stagnation.

The difference between the two is invisible from the outside, until the end.

The reason the wintering few register as dangerous, when they re-emerge, is that they have something the still-busy don't have: a center of gravity. They've spent enough time alone with a single problem to develop actual opinions about it, opinions that don't move when other people push on them. In a culture optimized for constant repositioning, conviction is a structural advantage. The market doesn't know how to price it.

The winterer has been watching while you weren't looking. They've watched the consensus shift, watched the mistakes pile up. When they come back, they come back with reads you can't get from inside the swirl, because the swirl makes you stupid.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, writing in The Life of the Mind in the 1970s, described thinking itself as a form of withdrawal. You can't think and act at the same time, she said, because thinking pulls you out of the stream of ongoing events. She was suspicious of people who claimed to do both at once.

The British psychiatrist Anthony Storr, in Solitude (1988), made the case that the most original work of major figures often came out of long isolated stretches. Newton in plague-year Cambridge. Wittgenstein in Norway. Kafka in Zürau. Beckett in his Paris apartment with the curtains drawn. Storr wasn't romanticizing it; the isolated stretches were often miserable, sometimes pathological. But the work that came out of them had a density that wasn't available to people doing it part-time.

Any culture that systematically punishes withdrawal is going to lose its most concentrated thinkers to either burnout or invisibility. The modern knowledge economy, with its ambient pressure to post, ship, and stay in the conversation, is a machine for producing exactly that loss. The people we'll wish we had in 15 years are, right now, being shamed into producing slop they don't believe in, because the alternative is to drop out, and dropping out reads as failure.

The winterers who survive this will be those who can tolerate looking like they failed. This is a real and rare psychological skill, and most people don't have it. It requires you to be okay with the wrong kind of silence around your name for years. It requires you to pass on small wins that would re-establish your position. It requires you to bet that what you're working on is worth more than what you're giving up, when the only person who can evaluate the bet is you, and you might be wrong, and you'll only know in 7 years.

Lincoln didn't know in 1851 that he was wintering.

He thought he was finished.

He told his law partner William Herndon that his political career was over, and he believed it. And then his country produced an emergency that demanded exactly the kind of mind he'd been nurturing, and he was the man of the hour whose hour had finally come.

The people who appear to have stopped, in any given year, are mostly people who have actually stopped. But small fraction of them are doing the other thing.

Our world produces emergencies on a reliable schedule; when the next one comes, watch who walks out of the woods.

Westenberg is designed, built and funded by my agency, Studio Self. Reach out and work with me:

Work with me

Published on Citation Needed: "No new trial for Sam Bankman-Fried" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-04-28T22:55:21.000Z

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

No new trial for Sam Bankman-Fried

The former CEO of FTX has essentially no realistic avenues left to avoid his 25-year prison sentence

Should something change? - Joel's Log Files

2026-04-28T15:30:00.000Z

This is a pretty personal post btw, not dark or anything but it may not be up your alley to have my ramblings and questions get to you or something.

A few weeks ago my mom had a talk with me, when she discovered my videogame collection. To be clear, it was not even hidden, you only have to enter my bedroom and look to the right, something she has done before, my guess is she never stopped to count them or she didn’t think those boxes were all games, whoops.

She was worried about me, and talked about how I need to focus on the right things and stop getting distracted by the internet and videogames, and that I should not be spending so much money of it. She doesn’t know how much I actually spent, but well let’s just agree that it’s not insignificant.

I do also agree with the time investment/getting distracted part. I do waste time on YouTube, and even if I mostly stick with the fediverse for social media, it still can be a bit of a timesink. I definitely could do without some of the impulse purchases I’ve made before.

But calling videogames a distraction doesn’t sit right with me. They have plenty of positives, but I don’t think I need to talk about that here.

One of her questions was about what do I even do sitting in front of a computer most of the time, once I arrive home from work, especially when it’s been a while since I’ve gone to the gym too. Yes it’s YouTube, and scrolling on social media, maybe some PC games here and there or some graphic design on Inkscape. I’ve never been clear about it, “I’m just using it”, I say, whenever I am working on my blog, writing or editing a post. I use a window manager on Linux, so it’s always easy to switch my screen to a browser or whatever. Sometimes I don’t mind to show the editor though, they don’t read that closely.

I don’t have to hide the stuff, to be honest, if my parents stumbled upon any post from my archive, they wouldn’t find anything new about me or something that would change the way they see me, the only difference is they’d know I share it online, when I don’t talk much in person about things that interest me. That reminds me of another post I wrote a while ago about how terrible I am at explaining my hobbies. Either way, the face I show to the people in real life is not too different to here. I try to be honest.

Writing for me is a hobby and a bit of a ritual by now, no matter how fancy I try to explain why I write on a blog post, I don’t know how I would say it in real life. I feel that spending time typing out words that are not a novel or something that makes money doesn’t make sense to most people, it’s not productive I guess? Even less so when I don’t even care for ads and sponsored content—I wouldn’t mind reviewing a handheld or getting a steam code every once in a while though ;)

Back to videogames for a bit, it’s true that there are plenty of experiences more important than them, sometimes they can become an escape, and while that isn’t wrong, acknowledging reality matters, I don’t want to trick myself otherwise. I should be looking forward and actively work towards achieving something more. Perhaps it’s kind of a cliche but I do want to save up for a home, I do want to find a partner to share my life with, get married, and form my own family, I want to go through the good and the bad moments all of that entails, so many questions and things to experience. I want to live a good life, and that shouldn’t just be on the web, or just videogames or writing, but people, community, life.

But even then, videogames are awesome, I love to play them and to experience them, the variety of stories I get to live through, the challenges I manage to overcome, the mechanics and puzzles and gameplay I learn and even master sometimes. I think it’s possible to have both things so I don’t see myself ever leaving them completely.

I look at my dad who didn’t grow up with games and refuses to play them nowadays, and like, yes, he’s cool and he does read a lot and other things, but I want to also show my kids how to appreciate videogames from the ground up. There’s some pretty cool dads out there which are also a model for me, but nobody is perfect, so I parse through the examples of those that come before me and that I’ve met during my life, to grow myself according to some ideal. I may never reach it, but getting close is enough.

Yep, my kids will be playing SNES and GBA games before they learn what polygon-based graphics are, they’ll be getting stories from JRPGs and get used to waiting for their turn to move while the enemies still attack you, they’ll get used to a couple buttons and a d-pad before they need to use dual analog sticks. Eventually we’ll get to Halo and they will understand that you don’t need a run button to have fun in first-person shooters.

Reading and writing too, they spark so much, they inspire so much. Before bed I will read for them, stories from Jules Verne and C.S Lewis, like I did. They’ll learn how to solve the Rubik’s cube and all of that. They will have their own pens and learn cursive writing and know a world before whatever the future is. At least that’s what I’d like, but it doesn’t have to be any of that, I think I just want them to love learning.

Woah look at me, talking about what’s yet to come. It’s so weird, but I guess it’s something I’d like. If they want to do something else or lack any interest on anything of what I have to show and teach them, I will still try to guide them, but I’ll have to accept their choices, and love them regardless, it’s okay too. Maybe this is one of those posts I wouldn’t want my parents to read, why am I typing all of this out anyway?

I remember, I was looking for ideas online and just saw the way Robert starts a writing session and thought I may as well do the same, just another ramble of thoughts flowing one after another without any particular structure, and well now I am revealing a bit of what my hopes are.

I guess there’s a bit of a barrier to express myself fully in person. I am, after all, an introvert. I still barely talk during lunch with my coworkers, preferring to scroll on my phone instead or read some manga. I still don’t go out that much and if I do, it’s just to go by myself to some public space and read there instead of talking or meeting people. It’s not like I’m about to change who I am just yet though… I guess I could say I’ll try but not even sure how to start I guess.

Are videogames a deterrent on my progress? Is writing the same? I’ll spend less money on videogames sure, I already have a big backlog anyway so. Should I write a little less and experience more? Should I spend my free time in other things? I don’t particularly feel the need to. I eventually want to make a trip somewhere, like Japan, or Canada or some European country, Spain could be fun too I don’t know.

What’s this post about? How will I even title it? I talked about so many things from gaming being a good thing for me, to blogging and writing being things I don’t mention much and how I don’t want people around me to know I do it even if I don’t care that much, to building a family in the future and raising mini versions of me who will get into my hobbies and my wife’s too of course but ideally we’ll share some of them and…. I’ll just stop rambling about it all for now.

I’ve been working for two years now doing the same thing, and I guess that’s a totally normal thing too, I get good money, I don’t get overworked, I am building up on vacation days and the like. It’s all good, do I want more? Would that help? I don’t really want to rattle things that much, but I wonder if I’m stuck in a bit of a cycle. I have been thinking about the next step for a while, I don’t know which is it, or maybe I do and I just don’t want to take it yet, I like how things are, even though I feel something should change.

This is day 58 of #100DaysToOffload.

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Stop Ubuntu Resetting Your Icon Theme When Toggling Dark Mode - Kev Quirk

2026-04-28T13:55:00.000Z

The Papirus icon theme is my favourite - I've used it for years and it continues to work beautifully. So while I've been rebuilding my Framework 13, it was one of the first things I installed.

But there's a problem, dear reader. You see, I'm a proud light mode person, but I regularly switch to dark mode when working in the evening. However, Ubuntu has this silly bug where it switches back to the default Yaru icon theme whenever one switches between light and dark mode.

Annoying.

On my previous machine I had a cronjob running every minute that simply checked the theme and switched it to Papirus if it was Yaru. That worked fine, but wasn't the most elegant solution.

So, this time I did more research and came up with a slightly more elegant ~~fix~~ workaround.

How to "fix" it

Ok, it's pretty simple. It consists of a small script that runs whenever Ubuntu flips between light/dark mode, then 0.2 seconds later, switches the icon theme back.

Far from perfect, but it's better than a script that runs every minute the machine is running.

To do this, create a new script at ~/.local/bin/watch-darkmode.sh with the following contents:

gsettings monitor org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme | while read -r line; do
    if echo "$line" | grep -q "prefer-dark"; then
        sleep 0.2
        gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme 'Papirus-Dark'
    elif echo "$line" | grep -q "default"; then
        sleep 0.2
        gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme 'Papirus'
    fi
done

You need to make the script executable, so run this next:

chmod +x ~/.local/bin/watch-darkmode.sh

Next thing is create a .desktop file that tells GNOME to automatically start the script when we log in:

# Create the file
nano ~/.config/autostart/watch-darkmode.desktop

# Paste this into the nano window
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Watch Dark Mode
Exec=/home/YOUR-USERNAME/.local/bin/watch-darkmode.sh
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true

Remember to change YOUR-USERNAME on the Exec= line to whatever your Ubuntu username is.

That's it! Log out, and back in again, and the script should be doing it's thing in the background. So the next time you switch between light and dark mode, your fancy-pants icon theme should persist.

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The workload of AI - destructured

2026-04-28T04:00:00.000Z

One of the fundamental deceptions of AI is that it reduces work. It looks that way only because you receive the output through a very narrow aperture, creating the illusion of ease.

Anatomy of an AI System is a fantastic resource that strips away that illusion. The patient accumulation of detail exposes how “each small moment of convenience — be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song — requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data.”

One of the principal functions of consumer-grade AI is to shift the burden of all that work onto other people. It is an insidious technology precisely because it makes the end user complicit in vast externalities. For most operations, AI requires more work than simply doing the task yourself. By obscuring your view of that work, AI makes it Someone Else’s Problem.

That critically undermines “I only use it for small things” as a justification. It’s the accumulation of small things that makes some technologies so destructive. Cars wouldn’t do nearly so much structural and environmental harm if we only used them for the occasional long trip. It’s the multiple daily drives to points within walking, bicycle, or mass transit distance that have the biggest impact on our health and the shape of our communities.

Likewise, the accumulation of idle prompts, of small tasks, of tweaks and casual experiments and revisions offloaded to a process designed to shield you not just from the work involved but also from an awareness of the work involved — these all contribute to a burgeoning strain on communities both far away and closer to home than we sometimes suspect.

Tomodachi Life, Werewolves and Heliocentrism - W17 - Joel's Log Files

2026-04-28T03:25:57.000Z

Did you know I kinda always forget what to write in the main, regular section of these weeknotes? The structure I usually type these things is something like: introduction, games, books or manga I reading, shows/movies/anime I watched, youtube and blogposts, leaving the regular notes at the end! It’s a bit weird to do it in such a way but I can’t help it. I guess it also speaks about the kinds of things that I write about with more ease, I don’t know.

🏠 I have been home alone since Wednesday and I must admit this is probably the most irresponsible I’ve been when staying by myself. I usually do the dishes every day, but this time I let them build up for a couple of days before cleaning them, evil stuff.
🏰 We were so close to playing Land of Eem this weekend, but we didn’t plan it out at all and half of us forgot to bring our character sheets and I didn’t have backups and the printer didn’t work anyway so… yeah. We played some Uno Liar’s instead, and a new game in the next item of this list!
🐺 We finally were enough to go for a play of a certain game everyone knows but that it’s a little hard to start given the necessary amount of players: Werewolves. Specially The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow, which is a very nice set with some pretty cool rules to it. I got it at the same time as Coup, but we just couldn’t play it until today. I was a little afraid that everyone would not be up for it, but in the end, we played it like 6 times, and we hard an absolute blast! I only hope more friends join us next weekend.
👔 There was this important meeting at work where everyone wore fancy formal office wear and I was wearing a hoodie and we took a photo and I was put at the back to hide it. Honestly I felt really embarrased about missing that email mentioning the dress code, that was definitely cringe. At the same time I think it was no big deal, still got a bit of teasing from my workmates though.
🧱 I ended up buying another Lego set, this time because of Clayton, it’s the DeLorean from Back to the Future!. It’s not the super expensive version at least.

Watching

Hear ye, hear ye. For I have witnessed one of the most important works of anime in recent years. I am talking about Orb: On the Movements of the Earth, an absolutely stunning piece of art where we follow the journey of Rafal, a young kid who wants to understand the truth, a young kid who loves space, and wants to become an astronomer.

Eventually, he’ll stumble upon a heretic, a man who believes in the forbidden idea of Heliocentrism who, before his execution, plants the idea of his mind to pursue the truth: the earth moves.

The journey that follows is one of the most beautiful, tragic and thought-provoking I’ve had the privilege to watch. So much so I want to watch it again, knowing what I learned is yet to come and how everything fits and connects.

It’s an epic tale that mixes history and legend, that explores humanity, our place in Earth, the beauty of creation, the nature of God, why belief remains or why society doesn’t need it. Reason, faith, naturalism, progress. So many incredible dialogues, speeches, and exchanges of ideas, or censorship, blindness, and persecution. Many moments here left me absolutely speechless, and this show got me to cry more than once. This is art, this is humanity, curiosity, and our endless pursue for knowledge.

Check this speech light on spoilers, and tell me you aren’t interested to see more…

Transcript of the speech

As a disciple of the Church, I know I shouldn’t use these words lightly. But I can’t think of any other way to express it. Reading and writing… are like miracles.

Of course, I don’t mean they’re the same as the miracles performed by our saviour!

Still, reading and writing are amazing. Using letters, a person can cross space and time. I might shed tears reading the news from 200 years ago, or laugh at rumors from 1000 years ago. Isn’t that unbelievable?

Our lives are trapped, beyond our control, in this day and age. But when I read, the great figures from the past engage me in conversation. At that moment, I can escape the present.

Thoughts put into writing remain after we are gone, and they might spur someone into action far in the future. What else could you call that, but a miracle?

Gaming

Every single day of the week until the weekend arrived, I played Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. At first, I was enamoured by the mechanics and the stealth, the voice acting and all of the stuff I already wrote about, but I have to say, I’ve really gotten to like these characters quite a lot. I’ll be honest, I’ve been looking at gameplay of this game to see stuff that I should be doing and realizing how little of the game I knew back when I first tried it.

For example, there’s a whole arsenal of goods that I never unlocked because I followed the main story and ignored most of the side quests and the rather deep management simulator that happens between missions. There were also weapons I never knew how to use, like the chaff grenade, which is extremely useful to disable enemy machinery and confuse the AI bosses’ circuits, making them much easier to target too.

The story, which I didn’t really know much of, has managed to get a grip on me anyway. I’ve been told there’s a lot of lore on this series, and that it’s also very confusing, but this particular game is filled with melancholy and regret, and the delivery and writing here have managed to transmit that very well, even if I didn’t play through the moments this game brings to memory. All in all, a super enjoyable journey so far.

After such a mature and expertly made videogame, I decided to buy Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream on a whim. This is one of the most trending games right now! A sort of dollhouse game where you can create Miis of whoever you want, from people you know in real life, to celebrities or characters from videogames, and see how they interact with each other! I’ve been having a lot of fun, even made Miis of a couple of fediverse friends like Amin and Daniel. I’ve also created a few others from characters from games, shows and anime, such as Lucca, Aya Brea, Ada Wong, Claire Redfield, Big Boss, Zuko, and Frieren. There have been a couple IRL friends included, of course, which I won’t name here.

Lastly, I had a brief session of Metroid Fusion, where I defeated Serries, the water serpent boss that was taken over by the X virus, and I managed to get the Speed Boost power-up! Nothing more than that, though.

Reading

I completed The Indomitable Captain Holli! the novella from Clarkesworld Magazine #211, and it was incredibly enjoyable, so much so I almost want to write a separate review for it. But I won’t, you really should give it a read, especially because it’s available for free on Clarkesworld’s website!

I’ve continued on with my manga obsession and read up to chapter 289 of Fly Me To The Moon, which continues to be very funny and entertaining!

Lastly, a new contender, a rom-com titled Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You, featuring Sasaki, a hardworking middle-aged guy stuck in the corporate ladder, whose often goes to the supermarket to see Yamada’s smile, a young cashier working there who seem rather friendly and innocent.

After Susuki goes for a smoke, he’s approachted by Tayama, a cool-loking young lady—who is actually an alter-ego of Yamada, but looks and acts way different—who invites him to smoke and chat together, while also sussing out his intentions to see if he’s not just a creepy old guy. An unusual relationship follows from there! I’ve read 42 chapters already (including a bunch of shorter bonus chapters).

Around the Web

I didn’t feel like writing actual summaries this time around, I already wrote too much on the sections above, byee.

Blog posts

Do you want to build a treehouse? - Yes, I want to build a treehouse.
I’m Glad I Enjoy Older Stuff - Yes, I am glad I enjoy it too.
I Also Got An Xteink X4 - Yes, you are very welcome my friend.
personal homepage tips - yes, Elle has lot’s of good tips.

YouTube

Why Nintendo almost got rid of Miis - They are back with Tomodachi Life so I’m happy.
The Most Important Tiny Decision In Tech History - I kinda didn’t like this video, but I also don’t know if I can debate it.
Was Link’s Pink Hair Really a Mistake? - Apparently it wasn’t, weird stuff.
Vampire Crawlers Demands Your Attention - Very good video essay.

This is day 57 of #100DaysToOffload

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Peace, Quiet, and No Signal - Hey, it's Jason!

2026-04-28T00:00:00.000Z

A visit to dark sky country! Just peace, quiet, and no cell signal.

The Loop: everything has happened before, and everything will happen again - Westenberg

2026-04-27T22:38:38.000Z

Upgrade

In February 1637, a single tulip bulb in Haarlem sold for 5,200 guilders - the price of a canal house on the Keizersgracht // ten times the annual salary of a skilled craftsman. The bulb was a Semper Augustus, streaked white and flame-red, and the buyer never saw it. He bought a piece of paper representing a future flower, and within 3 weeks, the market collapsed. Men who had mortgaged their workshops to buy futures on something they would never hold went home to explain it to their families. Within a century, the Dutch and English were back, inside the South Sea Company, whose directors had printed prospectuses for an undertaking they refused to describe. Within two centuries, French investors were holding the worthless scrip of John Law's Mississippi Scheme, which had promised them a share of Louisiana gold that didn't exist. By the 1840s it was railway shares, with one in ten English investors buying into lines that were never built. By the 1920s it was radio stocks. By the late 1990s it was dot-com. By 2008 it was tranched American mortgages, rated AAA by people paid by the banks that issued them. By 2021 it was JPEGs of monkeys. By 2026, it was AI stocks.

Every one of these episodes was preceded by someone writing a book about how the last one could never happen again, and every single one ended with the same sentence murmured like a prayer on the way up:

This time is different.

…But it never is.

Is it?

The claim I want to make…

Humans do near-identical things, over and over again, across history. And we do it because our cognitive equipment hasn't changed - the brain running a 21st-century civilization is a Paleolithic brain, shaped by 200,000 years on the savannah and another 10,000 years in small agricultural settlements, and it fears the same things our ancestors feared, and it wants the same things they wanted, and it fails in the same ways.

The loop itself is, in fact, our operating system.

Everything else, the political systems, the technologies, the languages, the ideologies, is the application layer. Applications change, but the operating system doesn't. When an application throws the same error message in Rome, in Berlin in 1933, in Phnom Penh in 1975, and on a Saturday afternoon in a suburban American town in 2024, the error sits in the kernel - and the kernel is not getting patched.

The bubble

The financial bubble (and by that I mean every financial bubble) is the cleanest version of the loop there is. Prices rise, greed overrides caution, debt piles on debt, and the floor gives way. Within ten years the same people, or their children, do it again. And again. And again.

Every bubble is catalogued and studied before the next one begins. Charles Mackay wrote Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in 1841. The book became a bestseller among the same London financiers who would soon be pouring money into Latin American mining schemes that required them to invest in countries they couldn't find on a map. In 1929, Irving Fisher, one of the most published economists in America, declared that stocks had reached a permanently high plateau - and the crash began nine days later. In 2005, Alan Greenspan testified to Congress that American housing prices reflected local conditions and there was no nationwide bubble. In 2008, there was. The brain has a failure mode around probabilistic risk: it discounts low-probability catastrophic outcomes in favor of high-probability mild gains, it reads social consensus as information, and its dopamine circuit rewards the anticipation of gain more reliably than the gain itself.

The hunt feels better than the meal.

Humans pretty reliably miscalculate risk at every step of the process, but somehow the profession of finance is built on the assumption that markets aggregate these miscalculations into wisdom. They don't. They aggregate them into stampedes, and herd cognition does the rest. When everyone around you is buying, the cost of not buying is financial + social. You miss the gain, and your neighbor gets rich, and your brother-in-law mentions it at dinner. The brain treats this as a threat to status, and status, in primate terms, is survival. Solomon Asch's conformity experiments in 1951 showed that ordinary people will deny the evidence of their own eyes rather than disagree with a confident group, and bubbles are Asch experiments with money on the line.

Every bubble ends with the same discovery, which is that the asset was never worth what it traded for; every bubble starts, though, from the matching belief that this time, it is.

The strongman

The strongman arrives on schedule, and the preconditions are consistent. A frightened middle class + institutions that have stopped delivering + an establishment that has lost the trust of the people it governs. Put those pieces in a room together and within a decade someone walks in who promises to cut through all of it. Caesar in 49 BCE. Napoleon in 1799. Mussolini in 1922. Hitler in 1933. Perón in 1946. A catalogue since then that hardly needs naming. The strongman is a phenotype; he's what the interaction between primate dominance hierarchies and political instability produces. Chimpanzee troops have alpha males, and human societies have them too. Under stable conditions, the alpha position is distributed across institutions, softened by law, and rotated by elections. Under unstable conditions, the position re-concentrates around a single body. Frans de Waal watched the same sequence play out among captive chimpanzees at Arnhem; Hannah Arendt watched it play out among human beings in the twentieth century. The mechanics were the same. The stakes differed only in body count.

Apparently, the human brain under stress doesn't want deliberation; it wants authority. Uncertainty burns more energy than bad news, and so the prefrontal cortex tries to resolve ambiguity, and when it fails, it hands control to older circuits that prefer a simple answer to the right answer - any right answer. MRI studies of people presented with ambiguous political images show amygdala activation patterns close to indistinguishable from fear responses; the feeling of not knowing whether your world is safe is, in brain-chemistry terms, very close to the feeling of being in danger.

And, sooner or later, there will always someone willing to supply the simple answer. The man who says he alone can fix it believes it, because the crowd that believes it first has already told him so; what his opponents call a lie, he experiences as a revelation. The feedback loop between a frightened population and a would-be strongman runs on the same neurology in both directions: he needs them as much as they need him, and they produce each other.

The cycle tends to run thirty years from collapse to collapse. Long enough for the generation that lived through the last strongman to die, and short enough that their grandchildren are available // ready // willing to repeat the experiment.

The scapegoat

When a society is in pain, it finds someone to blame. Rarely the structure. Rarely the people who benefit most from the structure. Always someone weaker, someone already marginal, someone who can be sacrificed without the majority feeling the cost. Jews in medieval Europe during the Black Death, when entire communities were burned alive on the accusation that they had poisoned wells, and Jews again in Weimar Germany during the hyperinflation. Catholics in Elizabethan England, hunted by priest-catchers who were paid by the head, and Chinese merchants in Indonesia in 1965, and again in 1998. Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 dead in a hundred days, killed with machetes by neighbors who had lived next door for generations. Muslims in post-9/11 America. Immigrants, always, everywhere.

The mechanism was described by René Girard, a French literary critic who argued that violence against the innocent is the engine of social cohesion. His book Violence and the Sacred in 1972 laid out the structure: a community in conflict with itself discovers that it can reconcile by turning collectively on a single victim, and all that the victim has to be is unanimous. Guilt is beside the point, which is the part of this I find hardest to sit with; once the blow lands and the crowd goes quiet, the community feels cleansed. Girard's work sits uncomfortably among the more respectable social sciences because it says something his colleagues didn't want to hear: the crowd's sense of unity is purchased with the body of someone who didn't deserve to die, and the mechanism doesn't give a shit about ideology. It works for medieval Catholics, for Jacobin revolutionaries, for Nazi party members, for Twitter mobs. The crowd needs its victim, and the victim needs to be innocent enough that the guilt of destroying him is too heavy to carry, which is why the sacrifice must be followed by denial.

The scapegoat loop is neurology under pressure. The brain performs in-group and out-group sorting in under 200 milliseconds, before conscious perception arrives - a feature of human vision that kept small bands of primates alive on the savannah. A stranger at 40 meters could be trade or death. You didn't have time to think it through. Demagogues know this, or they feel it, which amounts to the same thing. They weaponize a perceptual shortcut human beings can't turn off, and they provide a face for a pain that has no face. The crowd does the rest.

The invention that eats its children

The printing press was going to democratize knowledge. And it did! But first, it launched two centuries of religious war. Johannes Gutenberg pressed his first Bible in 1455. By 1517, Luther's theses were being reproduced across Europe in weeks, and by 1618, the Thirty Years' War had begun. By its end in 1648, a third of the German-speaking population was dead. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change in 1979 documented how the technology that was supposed to bring light to the masses also industrialized the production of astrology, witch-hunting manuals, and anti-Semitic pamphlets. The press amplified everything, including the things its advocates hoped it would abolish.

Radio was going to educate the masses. It gave Hitler a direct line to every kitchen in Germany, and Father Coughlin a direct line to thirty million American listeners in the 1930s, and Radio Rwanda the tool it needed to coordinate a genocide in 1994. Television was going to create an informed electorate - but it simultaneously created a visual electorate, which turned out to be a different thing. Marshall McLuhan saw all of this in Understanding Media in 1964 and was called a charlatan for saying so.

Social media was going to connect the world.

Well, it has, and the connection is the problem.

Every new tool that reshapes a society follows the same arc: it gets pitched as utopia, adopted before anyone understands it, panicked about ten years too late, and regulated (badly) ten years after that. By the time the culture has a theory of what the tool does, the social fabric has already been re-stitched around it, in a structural mismatch between the speed of technological change and the speed of social adaptation. The brain adopting a new tool has never been the brain that understands its second-order effects, because the lag is biological. The telegraph took 50 years to saturate the industrialized world, but the internet took 20, and the smartphone took 10.

And generative AI has taken half of that to be near-ubiquitous…

The adaptation lag stays constant, meaning each new technology is more disruptive than the last. We're adopting tools - right now - that will shape the next century without having metabolized the last century's tools; the printing press hasn't been fully understood, radio hasn't been understood, television hasn't been understood, and the side effects of social media are being "lived" through in real time by people who haven't yet admitted what it's doing to us.

The war that ends all wars

Humans don't go to war despite knowing what war does, they go to war because the knowledge of what it does fades, even though it technically exists. Nobody forgot the pain of WW1. It just became less vivid…

The generation that fought swears never again, and their children believe them, but their grandchildren might not. By the fourth generation, war is an abstraction, something that happened to other people, in old photographs, with outdated weapons. William Tecumseh Sherman spent his last years giving speeches against war to audiences who listened attentively, and then sent their sons to Cuba in 1898.

The French generation that survived 1918 built the Maginot Line because it couldn't imagine living through another Somme, but their sons were overrun by a tactic that didn't exist when the walls were poured, by an enemy they had forgotten to fear. Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, produced a documentary in 2003 called The Fog of War in which he admitted that the policies he had designed had been wrong for reasons he actually understood at the time.

The film was released during the invasion of Iraq; the lessons were on screen, broadcast to millions, but the tanks kept rolling.

You can teach someone that fire burns, but you can't make them feel the heat. A lesson that can't be felt won't prevent the behavior it describes. Wilfred Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est in 1917 about the sweet lie that dying for your country was noble. The poem is taught in every British secondary school; it has stopped zero wars. The interval between great-power wars in Europe from 1648 to 1945 averaged around forty years. That’s how long it takes for the generational memory of the last war to fade from the bodies of the people who vote in the next one. The post-1945 peace in Europe is the longest stretch in recorded history, which means we have a decade or two before the generation that could say "I remember" no longer exists in political life.

What happens then, is what always happens.

The moral panic

Witches in Salem, 1692, where twenty people were executed on evidence so thin the colony issued an apology within a generation. Catholics in Elizabethan London. Comic books in the 1950s, after Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent triggered a US Senate investigation and forced the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Rock and roll. Dungeons & Dragons, where a generation of American parents were convinced their children were being recruited into a satanic cult by a dice game. Video nasties in 1980s Britain. The Parents Music Resource Center, chaired by Tipper Gore in 1985, running hearings against heavy metal. Rap music. Violent video games after Columbine. Social media. TikTok. Transgender rights. I feel like I’m reciting a depressing cover of We Didn’t Start the Fire…

The moral panic follows the same sequence every time. A new thing emerges that the older generation doesn't understand, and someone somewhere claims it's destroying children. The media amplifies the fear, and legislation follows. The panic burns out.

Then, twenty years later everyone agrees it was overblown.

Then, the next one begins.

The moral panic is a reaction to a loss of control; it's the terror that arises when a parent, or a culture, realizes the next generation is building a world they can't enter. The target changes every twenty years, but the terror doesn't change at all. The sociologist Stanley Cohen named the phenomenon in 1972 in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, writing about British seaside brawls between mods and rockers. The book could have been written about anything. A manufactured villain, a media cycle, a legislative response disproportionate to the threat etc, maps cleanly onto every subsequent panic, including the ones he couldn't have predicted. QAnon is a moral panic. So is the 1980s satanic-ritual-abuse craze that it grew out of, during which adults were sent to prison for crimes that forensic evidence later showed had never occurred. A panic doesn't have to be wrong to be a panic. It just has to be out of proportion, and they almost always are.

The empire

We all think our specific empire is the exception.

Rome believed it was eternal. The Chinese dynastic system believed in the Mandate of Heaven as a stable arrangement between rulers and cosmos, which is why each new dynasty claimed to have received the mandate from the last. The British believed their empire was a civilizing force that would last centuries. The Americans believe they're not an empire at all. Every imperial project follows the same arc: expansion driven by economic need, sold to the public as ideology. Overextension, and the cost of maintenance exceeding the benefit of possession. Internal rot funded by external extraction, and the slow or sudden loss of the periphery while the center insists everything is A-OK.

Edward Gibbon began publishing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, the same year the American colonies declared independence from the British. Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies in 1988 argued that civilizations fail when the marginal return on complexity flips negative, which is a technical way of saying that empires break when each new administrative layer costs more than it adds. The Romans kept adding layers until the layers collapsed under their own weight, and eery subsequent empire has done the same.

Empire is an emergent property of human social organization at scale. Dominance hierarchies scale, as they always have, and they always produce the same endpoint: a system too large to govern, too expensive to maintain, too proud to contract voluntarily. The final stage is denial. The senators in Honorius's Rome debated traditional agricultural policy in 410 CE while the Visigoths were sacking the city; the Ottoman Porte in 1911 was still issuing decrees about the administration of the Balkans after it had lost them; the bureaucrats of the Third Reich set a record for how many memos they were writing and sending in 30 days or so befoe Hitler’s suicide; the British government after Suez spent a decade insisting that the empire was managing an orderly transition, a phrase that meant nothing because nobody was managing anything; the Soviet Politburo in 1988 was discussing the modernization of Cuban sugar exports while their own economy imploded.

When the center begins to legislate the future of a periphery it no longer controls, the collapse is already underway.

The God cycle

Religions rise when the existing structures of meaning collapse. They institutionalize, they accumulate power and wealth, they become the thing they were founded to resist and they calcify. A new crisis of meaning arrives, and a new religion, or reformation, or spiritual movement rises up to replace them. The cycle runs from the Axial Age (Karl Jaspers's name for the period between 800 and 200 BCE when Confucius, the Buddha, Zoroaster, the Hebrew prophets, and the pre-Socratics emerged, each proposing a new relationship between the human and the cosmos) through the European Reformation, the First and Second Great Awakenings in America, the political religions of the 20th century, and the current explosion of secular faith substitutes - from Wellness to Bitcoin.

The true believers in CrossFit and the true believers in early 4th-century Arianism have more in common than either would like to admit. So do the adherents of long-form supplement protocols and the followers of Girolamo Savonarola, who burned the vanities in Florence in 1497 and was himself burned at the stake a year later. The impulse to purify the self through ritual deprivation is older than any of the current practitioners know - Bryan Johnson is reinventing the early Christian ascetic and selling it as biometrics. The brain requires narrative. When one narrative fails, it doesn't default to a net-zero narrative, it just grabs the nearest replacement, however ragged. This = a neurological need for meaning and coherence that no rational framework has ever been able to satisfy. The experiments of Michael Gazzaniga on split-brain patients in the 1960s showed that the left hemisphere of the human brain will manufacture an explanation for any observed behavior, including behaviors it didn't cause, rather than admit it doesn't know.

The brain won't tolerate a gap in the story, and if you don't give it a religion, it will invent one. The content of belief changes but the need for it doesn't, which is why the most confident atheists end up sounding the most religious. It’s the same apparatus, different idol.

The exhaustion

Deforestation in Mesopotamia by 2000 BCE left the fields salt-crusted and the population migrating; soil depletion in Roman North Africa turned the granary of the empire into desert within three centuries; the residents of Easter Island cut down every tree on the island, lost the ability to build canoes, and were reduced to eating the dead by the time Europeans arrived in 1722; the 19th-century guano trade reshaped Pacific geopolitics around bird excrement until the deposits ran out. Whale oil, coal, petroleum, silicon, compute, housing etc. And on it goes.

Every civilization finds a resource, builds itself around that resource, burns through it, and either collapses or scrambles for the next; it’s temporal discounting, the brain's systematic undervaluation of future consequences relative to present rewards, running at civilizational scale. The Atlantic cod fishery off Newfoundland was fished every year for 500 years, and then, in the decade after 1992, it collapsed and has never returned.

The Canadian government knew the catch was unsustainable in the 1980s, but the boats went out anyway. They had mortgages to pay. Every generation knows it's borrowing from the future, but no generation stops. The cognitive machinery that would allow them to care enough doesn't exist.

The revolution that becomes the thing it replaced

The French revolutionaries executed a king and installed an emperor.

The Bolsheviks overthrew a tsar and built a new one, with secret police larger and more thorough than the Okhrana had ever been. The Iranian revolution deposed the Shah in 1979 and produced a theocracy whose morality police have arrested more women than SAVAK ever did. The anticolonial movements across Africa and Asia expelled foreign rulers and produced domestic dictators within a generation. The tech companies “disrupted” monopolies and became monopolies. Every revolution promises a break from the past and delivers a reproduction of it.

This is close to structural; the act of seizing power requires the construction of hierarchies, the concentration of authority, and the suppression of dissent, the exact things the revolution was against. The tools of liberation turn out to be the tools of control…they have to be, because they're the only tools that work.

Robespierre in 1793 believed he was defending liberty by executing 17,000 people in ten months. By the time the guillotine took him too, in July 1794, the mechanics of the Terror had built a state apparatus more centralized than anything Louis XVI had commanded. Milovan Djilas, once a senior official in Tito's Yugoslavia, wrote The New Class in 1957 from his prison cell, describing how the communist revolution had produced a bureaucratic elite with privileges indistinguishable from the aristocracy it replaced. He was right, which is why he was in prison.

The revolution is in the method; you can't win by being peaceful against a state that isn't, and you can't build by refusing to govern. But the moment the revolutionaries become the government, they become the state, and the state has structural interests. Those interests don't care who's running it. George Orwell, who had seen the Spanish Civil War up close in 1937, understood this well enough to write Animal Farm about it in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four about it in 1949. Both books are taught in schools, and both are cheerfully ignored in practice. The revolutionaries who most need to read them are always the ones who believe the books can't possibly be about them…

The Cassandra

Every loop has someone who sees it coming, and they're never believed.

The evidence is strong, but the warning is unwelcome, and unwelcome beats true...

Jeremiah in Jerusalem before the Babylonian conquest was ridiculed in the temple courts, and thrown into a cistern, only to be vindicated after the fact by the destruction of everything he had warned about. Cato the Elder ended every speech with Carthago delenda est until his colleagues stopped listening. Churchill in the 1930s, was frozen out of government, still warning about German rearmament to a House of Commons that preferred to discuss cricket. Eugene Stoner testified before Congress in the 1960s about the inadequacy of the M16 rifle he had designed, and the Pentagon ignored him until American soldiers in Vietnam started being found dead with their rifles in pieces in their hands. The climate scientists of the 1980s, whose testimony was televised and archived and treated, for four decades, as the background noise of cable news. The economists who called the 2008 crash, including Raghuram Rajan at Jackson Hole in 2005, and were told by Larry Summers that their analysis was "slightly Luddite." The epidemiologists who warned about pandemic preparedness in 2015, whose reports were filed, then forgotten, then pulled off the shelf in March 2020 when there was no longer time to act on them.

Accurate prediction doesn't lead to prevention.

The reason is part political: acting on a warning is expensive, and ignoring it is free, up until it isn't. But it’s equal parts cognitive: the brain treats unfamiliar threats as less real than familiar ones, regardless of probability. Shark attacks over car crashes; plane crashes over heart disease; terrorist attacks over obesity. The risks that kill us are not the risks that frighten us, because the brain evolved in an environment where the frightening things were almost always the things that killed us, and we haven't updated the pattern.

Cassandra herself, in the Iliad and the Aeneid, was cursed by Apollo to always tell the truth and never be believed. Virgil gave her the line: insani Vatis verba, “the words of a madwoman.” Even without divine curse, the outcome is the same: truth has rarely been sufficient.

The loop

The loops are caused by the species. Bad luck, bad leaders, and bad cultures show up in every story but they don't generate the pattern. The pattern is downstream of the brain that produces the stories. That's the argument.

But can the loops be broken?

So far, the answer is discouraging; but they have occasionally been lengthened. The interval between crises has been extended, the damage mitigated, and the recovery accelerated. The post-1945 international order bought 80 years of relative peace in Europe by building institutions designed to resist the strongman loop - a massive, landmark accomplishment, but an accomplishment with an expiration date, because the institutions are only as good as the generation running them, and that generation is dying off in real time.

The bubble loop has been shortened in some respects by regulation and lengthened in others by cheaper borrowing; the scapegoat loop has been softened in many places by norms of tolerance, which the current decade is stress-testing; the empire loop has been delayed for the United States by a combination of military spending and currency dominance, neither of which is permanent; the invention loop has been accelerated by every successful attempt to regulate it, because the regulation creates markets for jurisdictional arbitrage that didn't exist before.

We're very good at making the loops run faster.

We're not so good at stopping them.

The loops persist because the brain persists, and you can build a fence around a feature of human cognition. You just can't. The loops are a tendency of the species, and you can push back against a tendency within limits that go only so far.

Seeing the loop while you're inside it is a good deal harder than it sounds. Every bubble feels like a new era, and everyone saying otherwise sounds like a total bore. Every strongman feels like a savior, at least until the night he stops taking questions, and every scapegoat feels like a real enemy, because your cousin lost his job last month and somebody has to have taken it. Every war feels necessary. Every panic feels justified. Every empire feels eternal and every new God feels true. Every resource looks infinite right up until it isn’t. Every revolution feels pure for about eighteen months. Every Cassandra looks hysterical.

Every mistake of the past was made by people who were certain they weren't making it.

The move, if there is one, is the move the Trojans couldn't make, the one the Weimar voters couldn't make in 1932, the one the subprime borrowers couldn't make in 2007, the one the American cod fleet couldn't make in 1991. Treat the thing that feels obviously true with the utmost suspicion. Look for the loop in the direction you most want to walk. Ask whether the people you most agree with are the same people who would have agreed with the crowd at every previous iteration of this same mistake. It won't save you - but it might slow you down. The loop is older than any of us, and the loop has been true for 10,000 years. I think it will be true tomorrow. The only thing we get to decide is what we do with the knowledge in the interval between now and whichever loop is already closing around us.

Westenberg is designed, built and funded by my agency, Studio Self. Reach out and work with me:

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Update #2 on the Framework Saga - Kev Quirk

2026-04-27T13:41:00.000Z

In case you hadn't heard (it's all I've been going on about for a couple weeks, so you probably have heard - sorry) I spilled coffee on my Framework 13, then after lots of testing and cleaning, I confirmed that the main board was dead.

The new main board was delivered this morning, so I went ahead and got it fitted to the chassis. Problem is, I'd pissed about the partitions on the 2TB NVMe so I could dump my install on the 1TB NVMe in my new ThinkPad T480. I tried booting up and fixing the 2TB NVMe, but it was screwed, so I cut my losses and went for a re-install of Ubuntu 24.04 instead.

I'm aware that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has been released, but I prefer to wait for the first point release before upgrading.

After 10 minutes or so, the plucky little Framework was alive!

So I spent most of the day (on my day off) configuring the fresh Ubuntu install back to how I had it before. Luckily the ThinkPad is working great, so I could use that as a reference to get everything pretty much exactly the same. After 3 or so hours work, we're back up and running with all my apps, data, and config restored.

Another issue

While setting up the laptop, I noticed that there was an issue with the screen. At first I thought it was just some residue from coffee-gate, but on closer inspection it looks like the bottom corner has somehow de-laminated.

I know this wasn't caused by the coffee spillage, as the stain would be brown. Plus the laptop would smell. I'm wondering if it's some isopropyl alcohol, or contact cleaner, from when I cleaned it out.

The only other explanation is that it has de-laminated due to the heat in the conservatory, but I doubt it. It doesn't get that hot in there, and it's only April.

This is the second problem I've had with screens on the Framework. The bottom of the screen de-laminated just a week after I got the laptop. I thought it was a fluke, and Framework support sent me a replacement immediately, but this has me thinking that the screens just aren't that good.

Can anyone else who has a Framework 13 confirm if they've had issues with the 2880x1920 display?

Final thoughts

Anyway, this is the last update in the saga. For all intents and purposes the Framework is now repaired. I'm waiting to hear back from Framework support to see if they have any recommendations, but if not, I'll probably have to buy a new screen too.

It's lovely to be back typing this post on the Framework. I've really missed this laptop, and the typing experience.

Geez this has been one expensive mistake! Take note, people - if you drink coffee around your computers, keep a lid on the cup!

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All You Fascists (Bound to Lose) - Werd I/O

2026-04-27T13:39:32.000Z

I've had "All You Fascists (Bound to Lose)" in my song rotation for a little while – for, you know, reasons.

Bette Midler's getting some coverage for her cover, so I thought I'd round up some other versions I like very much.

To begin with, here's that Bette Midler cover:

This Resistance Revival Chorus with Rhiannon Giddens version is probably my favorite: upbeat and alive.

The Billy Bragg version with Wilco is really strong too:

Nina Hagen's father Hans was a Holocaust survivor held at Moabit, and her paternal grandparents were murdered at Sachsenhausen. This is therefore a very personal cover:

Here's Ani DiFranco with Zoe Boekbinder, Gracie and Rachel, and Diane Patterson - all artists I love:

And finally, here's the great Woody Guthrie, one of my heroes, singing the original:

Theatre Review: Hadestown ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-04-27T11:34:27.000Z

Anaïs Mitchell has created something magical. I felt like giving a standing ovation after every song. Just pure theatrical joy delivered by a cast who know how to squeeze every drop of emotion from an audience.

Perhaps it was sitting right at the front of the stalls, but the opening of Hadestown feels like dinner theatre; almost cosy in its intimacy. The first act is so busy - there are a hundred-and-one things happening on stage that it occasionally becomes overwhelming. The second act is slightly more intimate, but no less dazzling.

Having the musicians on stage lends to the feel of being in a nightclub. The stereo separation makes it easier to pick out the various musical threads and brings a lovely texture to the songs. Also, who knew a trombone could steal a show?

Lots of the cast sing in their natural accents. A roaring northern Hades versus a Mancunian Orpheus makes for quite the thrilling combination. Having subsequently listened to the Broadway cast recording, it is amazing what a positive difference it makes.

And, yes, the obligatory revolve spins the performers on a near-constant merry-go-round. When I am King of the West End, the revolve will be banned for the laze cliché that it is!

A stunning show with a killer soundtrack and a delightful set of performers.

I've written before about how the pre-show and post-show experience shapes an event. The Lyric theatre is generously sized, so plenty of space to mill about before the show, rather than being crammed into a tiny bar. The toilets weren't in too bad a condition. Once again, no set dressing in the liminal spaces. Would it have been so hard to mock up some travel posters for the eponymous station? Or have something for people to take photos with?

The themed cocktail menu was inventive but shockingly expensive, even for London prices. The programme is only a fiver and, unlike other West End shows, is full of interesting information and not just an excuse to cram in adverts - excellent value for money.

After the curtain call, we get a few more minutes with the musicians, which was delightful. On the way out there was no leaflet offering a discount on return visits (unlike Avenue Q). There is, apparently, a "Hadestown Passport" which you can get stamped every visit - although I didn't see any evidence of that.

Implicit and explicit A.I. - destructured

2026-04-27T04:00:00.000Z

In a recent forum post about Canonical’s plans for Ubuntu, technical lead Jon Seager has drawn a useful distinction between “implicit” vs. “explicit” AI. Explicit, in his schema, denotes AI features that present as AI features, e.g. deploying an AI agent. Implicit features, by contrast, look like the sort of features that were available before AI, but work differently under the hood. Segar frames this in terms of cognitive load: “Implicit AI is about enhancing existing operating system features with the use of AI, without introducing new mental models for users.”

His example is “first-class speech-to-text and text-to-speech,” which could be enhanced using LLMs, but without changing the surface-level operation of TTS as a feature. He elaborates:

I don’t see these as “AI features”, I see them as critical accessibility features that can be dramatically improved through the adoption of LLMs with minimal (if any) drawbacks. Much of this can be achieved with local inference using open source harnesses and open weight models, which are both accurate and efficient for this use case.

Which seems innocuous enough. After all, who isn’t in favor of accessibility? (That, no doubt, is why dedicated AI boosters so often use accessibility features to a11y-wash the less savory aspects of the technology, like its environmental costs.) But does AI-enhancement to TTS features really need to be implicit? And what do we lose when it is?

Consider the case of a patient making a support call to their insurance company. Technically, AI can now handle such calls, but their reliability is subject to the vagaries of LLM search and summary functions, which are often dubious, to say the least. Yet, the ability of AI chatbots to produce convincingly human-sounding responses means that auditory cues may not be sufficient to inform the caller that they should change their mental model of the call as a source of guidance. They may reasonably believe that they’re talking to an actual human with the judgment and training required to help them navigate the health insurance system, which may lead them to accept as reasonable some responses that they would have doubted had they known that they were output from an LLM.

The important point here is that our hypothetical caller’s confusion is a direct result of the very feature Seagar cites as a good candidate for implicit deployment. The ability of an AI phone agent to replicate human speech is a direct application of text-to-speech voice synthesis. Implicit deployment may seem unproblematic when you focus on the use case of a hearing-impaired person deliberately opening a TTS app, but the same implicit features can wind up misleading the user with potentially serious consequences.

The change of context makes implicit deployment almost inherently misleading, a fact that can be exploited by companies that want to be less than wholly transparent with their customers. As a practical matter, we do see AI features being deployed both implicitly and explicitly (as well as in a third class we could call “ambiguously”), and the decision of which approach to take almost always appears to favor the deployer, rather than the end user. Thus, some companies rely on improved voice synthesis and response variability to present a human face to callers, even as they remove human agents from support positions. Making the transition implicit — or, at least, ambiguous — helps obscure and soften the caller’s loss of human contact, along with any attendant loss of agency they might have had in the process of sorting out their healthcare. This practically inverts the curb cut effect: Even cases where implicit deployment feels helpful (like TTS for accessibility), it turns out there are significant use cases that entail potentially severe consequences for the end user.

I characterized Seagar’s distinction as “useful,” but there’s two sides to that coin. One side is that it gives us terminology for identifying differences in how AI is being deployed, which we can then adapt to the purposes of socially responsible tech criticism. The other is that potentially gives deployers a permission structure for misleading or deceptive practices, like replacing human phone support with undisclosed AI systems, under the auspices of deploying an “implicit AI feature.”

So when is implicit deployment legitimate? Almost never. The burden of making AI use explicit is almost always less severe than the potential consequences that could arise from not knowing that a feature uses AI. Therefore, AI deployment should only be implicit when the intent is to deceive. In all other cases, developers should err on the side of caution by deploying AI features only when the AI use can be made explicit.

Why Is Everything Proprietary These Days? - Kev Quirk

2026-04-26T19:21:00.000Z

After 10 years of loyal service, the motorbike jacket that I wear most often gave up the ghost recently and ripped. Being a piece of protective clothing, a rip isn't a good thing, so I've been shopping around for a replacement.

But you see, motorbike jackets are complex, heavy garments that are littered with protective pads. They used to come with back protectors too, but it was later decided that these were too expensive, so you had to buy one separately.

No problem, they're standardised so you buy a good one and it can last you decades. There's just a big void in the back of the jacket with a number of velcro patches that any back protector will cling to.

That's what I have in my old jacket, and I assumed it was still the same now.

So today I bought myself a new jacket. It cost me £380 (on sale!) but you can't put a price on safety, right? I also have protective trousers that zip to my jacket all the way around my waist.

But the zip on my new jacket isn't compatible with the zip on my old trousers (how the fuck can a ZIP be incompatible??) so I bought the matching trousers for the new jacket, costing another £300.

So now I'm £650 lighter in the bank, but I have good quality motorbike clothing that should last me another decade.

This evening I went to swap the back protector from my old jacket to the new, only to find that many manufacturers now have brand-specific pads for their clothing that sit in perfectly sculpted pockets.

The specific back protector (which is a bit of rubber with some holes in it) for my jacket is fifty fucking pounds. So now I'm at £700.

Fifty quid's worth of rubber, apparently

Fuck that. I've bought a generic (but good quality) one, and I'll cut it to size.

Vendor lock-in

Whether it's phones, social networks, communication platforms, printer ink, laptop chargers, smart home systems, games consoles, coffee machines, electric toothbrush heads, camera batteries, or fucking motorbike jacket back protectors. Nothing is interchangeable.

It seems that every day another piece of standardisation is being washed away, and we as consumers need to make our choices, invest, and stick to a brand. You can switch, but it's gonna cost ya!

It's fucking ridiculous.

Over and over again we get shafted, and there's not a single thing we can do about it. I'm so tempted to take the jacket back for a refund, but what do I do then? I need a jacket for riding. I'd be screwed.

Fuck bike jacket manufacturers that do this. Fuck vendor lock-in. Fuck. This.

</rant>

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Sustaining innovation has failed us. It's time to think more radically - Werd I/O

2026-04-25T21:05:49.000Z

Link: A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform, by Jennifer Pahlka

Important analysis from Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, that is about government technology and services but could just as easily be about news and journalism.

She introduces the Three Horizons framework for thinking about change and building towards a shared vision of the future. Here, Horizon 1 is the status quo, Horizon 2 represents improvements to that system, and Horizon 3 represents an improved system rather than an optimized present.

There are four kinds of innovation: research, sustaining, breakthrough, and disruptive. The first two don’t lead us anywhere new on their own; they might provide extra capacity and create more headroom, but they aren’t systemic change. Any fundamental problems with the status quo probably won’t go away. In contrast, breakthrough innovation brings in fresh ideas to solve problems in a new way, and disruptive innovation creates new systemic models that serve people in new ways.

Jennifer’s point is that a lot of government reform work — including Code for America — has been sustaining or incremental at best, which has relieved some pressure but hasn’t really changed anything. The same problems persist.

Philanthropic funding has compounded the problem by funding that kind of innovation instead of more radical solutions. This, for me, is the key sentence in her piece:

“Funders need to ask not just whether an investment does good but whether it changes the conditions under which good can be done at scale.”

And there’s a finite window for more aggressive change. This has been created by the AI shift, changes in the US government, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other changes that have highlighted how poorly our current system has adapted.

In government, that need has become rather obvious, but it’s true in news too — another key part of our civic framework. (And this is also true for social media!) These same factors apply, and philanthropic funding has been similarly risk-averse, aiming for sustaining innovation that builds capacity rather than changing how everything works to serve people better. The fundamentals aren’t changing and they haven’t been serving us. We need to think much more radically, and we need to fund much more radically.

In that framework, it’s incredibly important to articulate what the more radical futures we could work towards actually are. Jennifer points out that there are multiple, potentially contradictory, possible futures — the point is not to coalesce into one agreed-upon Horizon 3 end state, but to be able to describe where any current change might be leading to. Where is this taking us, and why?

Let’s allow ourselves to imagine something better. And then, let’s finally go there.

AI is not a magic wand and it won’t fix your problems - Werd I/O

2026-04-25T18:47:10.000Z

Link: Why AI alone cannot fix social problems, by Deepak Varuvel Dennison and Aditya Vashistha in Rest of World

From the AI is a tool for people and not a replacement for them dept:

“AI is often framed as a tool for efficiency, but efficiency alone does not strengthen public systems without the underlying capacity being improved. Even when tasks are completed faster, the deeper constraints of the system do not automatically disappear. In many cases, AI ends up addressing the symptoms of these problems rather than their causes.”

If an institution — or an industry — is declining, adding AI won’t magically make it better. In the cases that these Cornell researchers highlight in this piece, there were only meaningful improvements when the underlying systems were working well and the human infrastructure around the software was well-developed.

Even beyond the lack of support for some regional needs (languages, dialects, accents) that created issues here, these systems worked best when the software was designed to support existing well-functioning human systems. If the human systems don’t work, if there isn’t human support, or if people are expected to adapt their processes to the needs of the software, the projects weren’t successful.

It isn’t a magic wand. There are important lessons here for news and other declining industries: adding software doesn’t absolve you of figuring out your underlying problems, and it will not solve them for you. It might even paper over them and make them worse.

It’s just another tool. Invest in your people.

The world is not a database - Werd I/O

2026-04-25T18:31:08.000Z

Link: The People Do Not Yearn For Automation, by Nilay Patel in The Verge

This piece is important to internalize — particularly for the terminally AI-pilled and people who might want to force everyone into using LLMs to do work they were previously doing themselves.

AI is incredibly unpopular, and it’s not because it’s bad at marketing. These are multi billion dollar companies that have attracted some of the brightest talent from across Silicon Valley across all disciplines. AI vendors are not underdogs who just need to get their message across.

Indeed:

“You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.”

“Software brain” is a fantastic name for a worldview that sees everything as databases that can be controlled, normalized, and optimized. As Nilay Patel puts it: “the idea that we can force the real world to act like a computer and then have AI issue that computer instructions.” This is not a new problem that has arrived with AI: we’ve been talking about people who were very good at making software who therefore thought they were geniuses who could take on any global challenge for a very long time.

Taking human experience, which is beautifully ambiguous and nuanced and nondeterministic, and trying to fit it into a database shape, is inherently extractive. Nilay points out that it flattens people, which is totally true, but it also transfers ownership of that experience from their subjective truth into a centralized database that someone else controls, sets the standards for, and profits from.

And yes: computers should support people. People shouldn’t support computers. The idea that we’ll all be left behind if we don’t pour our experiences, information, source material, communications, creativity, and all the rest of it into a computer system is absurd and offensive. By extracting that experience, flattening it, and changing ownership of it, it inherently devalues us, the humans who were its previous custodians. It certainly devalues labor, which is a problem in itself, but it also devalues all of the frictionful, living, breathing parts of being an actual human being.

The tools are useful. I think software development has probably changed forever. But they’re not useful for everything, and they’re not going to change everything. Everything isn’t a database. And if we think the world becomes better if we turn everything into one, we probably weren’t all that excited about humanity to begin with.

Note published on April 25, 2026 at 12:58 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-04-25T12:58:51.000Z

The White House says Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick properly divested from Cantor Fitzgerald by transferring leadership to his sons.

Anyway GOP officials called Lutnick about a Cantor-funded PAC planning to spend $1.75M on Ken Paxton and the PAC reversed course, but that’s probably just how independent companies behave when the former owner gets a phone call.

You can parse an .env file as an .ini with PHP - but there's a catch - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-04-25T11:34:15.000Z

The humble .env file is a useful and low-tech way of storing persistent environment variables. Drop the file on your server and let your PHP scripts consume it with glee.

But consume it how? There are lots of excellent parsing libraries for PHP. But isn't there a simpler way? Yes! You can use PHP's parse_ini_file() function and it works.

But…

.env and .ini have subtly different behaviour which might cause you to swear at your computer.

Let's take this example:

# This is a comment
USERNAME="edent"

Run $env = parse_ini_file( ".env" ); and you'll get back an array setting the USERNAME to be "edent". Hurrah! Works perfectly. Ship it!

But consider this:

# This is a comment
USERNAME="edent" # Don't use an @ symbol here.

It will happily tell you that the username is "edent# Don"

WTAF?

Here's the thing. The comment character for .ini is not # - it's the semicolon ;

Let me give you some other examples of things which will fuck up your parsing:

# Documentation at https:/example.com/?doc=123
DOCUMENTATION=123
# Set the password
PASSWORD=qwerty;789

That gets us back this PHP array:

[
  '# Documentation at https:/example.com/?doc' => '123',
  'DOCUMENTATION' => '123',
  'PASSWORD' => 'qwerty',
];

When the .ini is parsed, it ignores every line which doesn't have an = sign. It also treats literal semicolons as the start of a new comment until they're wrapped in quotes.

My code highlighter should show you how it is parsed:

# Documentation at https:/example.com/?doc=123
DOCUMENTATION=123
# Set the password
PASSWORD=qwerty;789

It gets worse. Consider this:

# Set the "official" name
REALNAME="Arthur, King of the Britons"

That immediately fails with PHP Warning: syntax error, unexpected '"' in envtest on line 1

You can use single quotes in pseudo-comments just fine, but if the ini parser sees a double quote without an equals then it throws a wobbly.

I'm sure there are several other gotchas as well. For example, there are certain reserved words and symbols you can't used as a key.

This will fail:

# Can we fix it? Yes we can!
FIX=true

It chokes on the exclamation point.

How to solve it (the stupid way)

The comments on an .env file start with a hash.

The comments on an .ini file start with a semicolon.

So, it is perfectly valid for a hybrid file to have its comments start with #;

Look, if it's stupid but it works…

What Have We Learned Here Today?

There's a right way and a wrong way to do .env parsing.
The wrong way works, up until the point it doesn't.
You should probably use a proper parser rather than hoping your .env looks enough like an .ini to pass muster.

On next week's show - why you shouldn't store your passwords inside a JPEG!

ThinkPad T480 Initial Thoughts - Kev Quirk

2026-04-25T10:48:00.000Z

Since my Framework had a coffee bath, I've been using a ThinkPad T480 that I picked up from eBay for £285 ($385).

This has been my main laptop for a few days now, and I have some thoughts, so I thought I'd share them since I've read mixed reviews on these plucky little laptops - everything from:

They're the best laptops in the world, EVARRRRR!

To:

They're overrated and overpriced - stop buying them!

My opinion is that the T480 is somewhere in the middle of these 2 opinions. Let's just in...

Price and condition

Like I said, I paid £285 for this laptop, which was listed as very good condition - refurbished". And I agree - the condition of the laptop is very good, especially considering it's been a corporate laptop and is 8 years old at this point.

It came with a 14" 1080p screen, 16GB RAM, a Core I5-8250U CPU (4 core, 8 thread @ 3.4GHz), a 256GB NVMe, and Windows 11 (which was promptly removed). I had a 1TB NVMe lying around, so I upgraded that first, and I've also bought a 32GB RAM upgrade costing an additional £70 ($95).

The RAM upgrade hasn't been delivered yet, so these thoughts are based on 16GB RAM.

My T480 (yes, those stickers needs to go)

Design and functionality

This laptop has bezels for days compared to my Framework, but that's to be expected. It's an old, utilitarian laptop - that didn't stop me getting a bit of a shock when I first cracked it open though. Now I've been using it a few days, the bezels don't bother me though.

I've always liked ThinkPad keyboards, and this is no exception. It works great, and has lots of travel on the keys, which I always appreciate. It's not as nice as the keyboard on my Framework, but I think that's the best keyboard I've ever used, Macbook included.

I'm not a fan of the textured finish that's all over this laptop though. It's on the case, on the keyboard, the trackpad, everywhere. It's like a slightly rubberised, gritty finish. It doesn't impact the functionality of the laptop, I'm just not a big fan of it.

The keyboard is backlit too, which I appreciate.

Battery and performance

Honestly, I was expecting the battery to be crap on the T480, being second-hand. But I was so wrong! It came with an extended battery fitted, and on checking it over, it's only had 2 charge cycles, so it brand new.

The battery will last all day, no problem at all. The other day I ran it for an entire working day, and at 15:00 it still had 61% charge left, with Ubuntu reporting another 6.5 hours of use remaining. That's incredible, in my opinion.

Ubuntu runs perfectly on this - all drivers were discovered fine, and I managed to get the fingerprint reader working with just a little bit of DuckDuckGo-fu.

Performance is good too. Everything feels snappy with no lag. Obviously it's not instant like on my Framework, but that thing is a powerhouse. Having said that, I could see myself using the T48 long-term without issue.

I'm currently running Firefox, Spotify, Obsidian, VSCodium, and a few other bits. Here's how the Ubuntu System Monitor looks:

So I'm using about half my RAM, and between 20-40% of the CPU. I don't need to upgrade the RAM, but it's nice to have the extra overhead in case I ever do need it.

I'm not much of a gamer, but the T480 will consistently run Minecraft at 40ish FPS, which is fine, and honestly better than I expected.

Final thoughts

Overall I think the T480 was good value for money. It's in really good condition, performs well, and is almost as repairable as my Framework. I think this laptop still has years of life left in it, so will it sit in a drawer once the Framework is repaired?

No, that would be a waste of both money, and a perfectly good laptop. My wife is currently using a 2014 X1 Carbon that I used for many years before switching to the Macbook M1 Air. The X1 is still going strong, but it's starting to struggle in its old age. Not to mention that my wife is still running Windows 10 on it!

So once the Framework is repaired, I'll be giving this laptop to my wife where it should continue to provide solid service for years to come, all while being a nice upgrade for her. The X1 will get the latest version of Ubuntu installed on it, and will be put out to pasture as the spare laptop for the household.

If you're on the fence about picking a T480 up, I'd say go for it. While they're no powerhouse, and won't win any beauty awards, they're a solid workhorse that still have many years of service left in them.

I'm very happy with my purchase.

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Craft and Artistry - Hey, it's Jason!

2026-04-25T00:00:00.000Z

That time I went to a show in Japan by one of my favorite artists! 😱