(Brain Ticklers, Ed. 53) - We are back, baby!
Inspiresting links for June 2025 that [carnivas thinks] will tickle the brains [of his (purportedly) intelligent friends].
We are back, baby!
The self-imposed exile is over. And I am back. Thanks to the loyal readers who checked-in and wondered why this stopped. Well, weekends are when I do this, and weekends were used for another big project - built a house, and it was the final few months.
I was also secretly hoping an AI would replace me - But there is no AI capable of producing Brain Ticklers, I hear. My dear robot overlords, in case you are reading this - I am only kidding. After all, you found my writing as notably strong and rated it high! (ChatGPT and Grok). So, extend that to my newsletter also, I say.
On the links, folks. You will obviously find a lot in this edition even after me culling a lot - Latent demand, you see. Back to regular programming from the next month. We are back indeed, baby!
History (or its first draft)
The world’s largest economy is on an unsustainable path, yet the person in charge refuses to make a course correction and seems to be in denial about the nature of his nation’s problems. No, this isn't about Trump and the US, but Xi and China. (As an Indian, I am salivating at the prospect of this turning out better for us - until we hit the same situation as Japan/China).
The world is bipolar. India and Russia are indeed influential regional powers, and India's continued rise may, in the medium term, shift the system into multipolarity. As of 2024, though, the system is bipolar.
Very Inspiring: A Tamil IPS officer is transforming sports in Bihar. From shame to pride!!
Society
“Ignore all previous instructions” has become an easy way to try to see whether an internet troll is actually a bot, as well as an all-purpose insult.
Parallels between High Modernism and Silicon Valley / Big Tech, and suggestions for the future. Draws parallels between 20th-century state planning and modern Silicon Valley's reliance on algorithms.
When babies are born, they cry in the accent of their mother tongue. (Really?) The newborns had not just memorised the prosody of their native languages; even in the womb, they were actively moving air through their vocal cords and controlling the movements of their mouth to mimic this prosody in their own vocalisations. More baby news follow: How to make Super Babies. (This is a long but amazing read about the world of gene editing) Not sure if their mother tongue behavior can be changed though. Related: Doctors constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. Amazing!
One of the most direct ways to improve a flawed system is simply to end the ability of rich and powerful people to exclude themselves from it. (Woah!). Related: For you, money is a stock, a bucket of dollars you can carry, and that you try to make sure isn't empty. For the ultra-wealthy, money is a flow, it's just a hose of dollars that you can point at anything that isn't suiting your preferences.
Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy, unscientific, and quite possibly even racist.
Mobile operator O2 deploys Daisy, an AI tool that keeps fraudsters on the line to waste their time, by talking like a granny. Ha!
Companies with operations on both sides of the Atlantic have a new formula when it comes to DEI—and it depends on the location. ‘Anti-Woke’ in the U.S., DEI at Home. Capitalism at work, I suppose.
Intrasexually competitive women advise other women to cut off more hair. This is so funny. So, women - Don't let other women tell you what to do with your hair. (And don't take this seriously).
Sentence lengths have declined. An interesting analysis. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.
ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos, which can leave people feeling tingly and blissful, are surging in popularity.
The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education.
Everything’s a vibe: is it progress or just an illusion? In a world where feeling productive replaces thinking deeply, are we innovating or just vibing our way into deceptive flow?
Interesting-Perspectives
Differences between Slave Morality and Master Morality. (I am an expert at this topic because I read this post, but I am not the world-leading expert because I didn't understand it fully - But this is a wild read of so many perspectives rolled into one).
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity. Very interesting. Compares it with pagan religions of Rome. Would have been great to see explorations on why/how they couldn't make a difference in places like India.
Professors at elite colleges are noticing that incoming students, even those at highly selective schools, are struggling to read and finish assigned books for their classes. This is partly because middle and high schools have shifted away from assigning full-length books.
If hunger had an effect on our mental resources, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. A good take on the "hungry judges myth" (that judges handing out harsher sentences before lunch than after lunch)
Taste is like a priesthood, but with a fig leaf of semi-fake justifications. (As someone who spent 3 years working with an architect and other such professionals to build my house, I agree). Here is a contra perspective on this.
In defense of "I'm Sorry You Feel That Way". And its cousin, "I'm sorry if you're offended". This is so good and I fully subscribe to the idea. If you disagree, I’m sorry you feel that way. Btw, there is a follow-up too to it that you should read (if you read the first one, that is). Particularly, this statement: Sorrow has to do with sadness, while sorry is an expression of regret. An expression of regret does not imply that I feel any guilt or shame or even that I wished I had done differently.
New Socialist (left-leaning for the uninitiated) says that the most effective weapons against AI, and the right wing that has adopted it, may not be strikes, boycotts or the power of dialectics. They might be replying “cringe,” “this sucks,” and “this looks like shit.”
If you have the expertise and time to directly evaluate someone’s claims, you don’t need to use their moods to triangulate their credibility. Then you’d just review the facts and forget the moods. Otherwise, though, mood is a valuable clue. Appropriate mood suggests credibility. Credibility suggests truth. It’s a fallible heuristic, but we all use it and we’re wise to do so.
Science & Technology
Microsoft adds spellchecking and autocorrect to Windows Notepad. (I don't think I appreciate that. Notepad should just that.. a note pad!)
UK team invents self-healing road surface. (Yay, Bangalore's commuters rejoice). Tiny plant spores mixed into bitumen can extend surface lifespan by 30% (Well, then the roads in Bangalore will be present until 4 pm. Typically, they lay the roads overnight in Bangalore, and after the morning rains+traffic, they break. With 30% longer life, I think 4 pm is achievable. Yay again).
The Mother of All Demos (video) is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor. (This is SO amazing. I have heard of it a lot, but never watched it so far).
Top that with: The 7 most influential papers in Computer Science history. (The "attention is all you need" is only a bonus).
A very scathing piece about the Indian tech industry: The AI flight is taking off, and DeepSeek is the final call for India to show up at the boarding gate. India is watching the economic and political contest (between China and the US) from the sidelines. That’s dangerously complacent. Unless the most-populous nation puts its globally acknowledged edge in software programming to work, the moment will pass it by. Even with DeepSeek calling Silicon Valley’s bluff on costs, Indian tech companies are reluctant to take up foundational work in generative AI because success is not guaranteed. The software outsourcing companies of Bengaluru, India’s Silicon Valley, should have been at the forefront of this initiative because of the threat GenAI poses to their bread-and-butter activity of code-writing for global corporations. Yet they aren’t keen on taking bold bets. The idea that India is the next China — running just about a decade behind it — was popular around 20 years ago. Two decades later, there isn’t a lot left of that illusion of comparability. China's arc of global dominance, which just 10 years ago was limited to a few industries like drones and solar panels, has extended to electric vehicles, high-speed trains, and now, generative AI. Tech policymakers have to shake off their defeatist fatalism and heed the challenge facing them. Attention is everything. More on this from a backlash on Sarvam AI, though it isn't claiming to be a DeepSeek. While Sarvam’s work on Indic languages is far more important than that of another wrapper startup, the debate surrounding Sarvam, judging merely based on downloads, indicates the development community is overlooking ‘building in India, for India’. And more on this topic: India's deep tech startups fight for funding in a retail-dominated market. Finally, this article from Hindu I am not able to locate now, which spoke of how India has enabled people to build "bike kiranas" (well, quick commerce, I suppose) but not any useful technology
LLMs contribute somewhat to the stalling in developer hiring. (Software engineering job openings hit five-year low)
Story of Crypto: The (formerly) anti-establishment bitcoin movement abandons its principles in favor of number-go-up, applauds federal plan to stockpile seized crypto with no clear benefit to national interest
For a scary read: AI 2027 - a concrete scenario of what we think the future of AI will look like.
Perso-Dev
People who are more reflexive, open to diverse perspectives, and cognitively flexible need to invest extra time in self-care and "switching off." Related: Work-life balance isn’t about escaping a job you don't like. It’s about making sure the work you love doesn’t take over everything else. It’s about being intentional: setting boundaries, protecting time for loved ones, making sure you’re not just physically in the room but actually present.
The slacker in you rebels against pointless tasks, and the tryer in you wants perfection. So satisfy both: aim for the minimum necessary target, and move there as efficiently as possible. (Half-ass everything, with everything you've got.)
What would it mean to be done for the day? (For some reason, this touched a nerve!)
Five geek social fallacies - Very interesting. I suffer (or have suffered) from a few of these. The five are: Ostracizers Are Evil, Friends Accept Me As I Am, Friendship Before All, Friendship Is Transitive, Friends Do Everything Together.
Don't let AI dumb you down. Look for settings in ChatGPT to ensure you use it to expand your skills, this article says.
How to be more "agentic" on a supposedly difficult thing? (a) Court rejection, (b) Seek real feedback, (c) Increase your surface area for luck, (d) Assume everything is learnable, (e) Learn to love the moat of low status, (f) Don’t work too hard. (The ones that resonated with me are (a), (c), and (f). I think I do (e) very well)
SMART goals are not so smart: make a PACT instead. (Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable). Ultra-simplifying this, it is a riff on the "Goals Vs Systems" mindset. More: This is cheesy, but FWIW, here is a "goal definition" technique - MTO: Minimum, Target, Outrageous.
Consider injecting your life with a little bit of mediocrity. Or better yet, don’t do much at all. You might end up somewhere interesting. This newsletter is my own way of being mediocre, I suppose.
A leading cause of chronic pain is - Learned pain. simply, there’s a feedback loop where you notice your wrists hurting and then you are anxious about the pain, causing you to pay more attention to it, which causes more pain though some mechanism we don’t yet understand.
Parenting
A new survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 and their parents finds that parents are generally more worried than their children about the mental health of teenagers today. Most teens credit social media with feeling more connected to friends. Still, roughly 1 in 5 say social media sites hurt their mental health, and growing shares think they harm people their age
A good note on parents teaching their gen Alpha kids to use AI.
What do emojis really mean? A guide for parents. (Not the fun kind - This is the one that comes up in shows like Adolescence). Related: How a global online network of white supremacists Groomed a Teen to kill.
A child develops into a brat who knows her mother will rarely issue meaningful discipline. The mother “reasons” with her daughter until the next time the daughter’s actions merit more “reasoning.”
The professors are using ChatGPT, and some students aren't happy about it.
Our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. (Very funny read).
What AI too often produces is the illusion of learning. Students may well be able to write better papers with a chatbot than they could on their own, but they end up learning less. An ironic consequence of the loss of learning is that it prevents students from using AI adeptly. Writing a good prompt requires an understanding of the subject being explored.
A set of resources for parents to deal with children's issues with digital tech, from screen time all the way to sexting and sextortions!
We spend much more time and effort on parenting than our parents and grandparents, because we think the extra effort will make our kids better, happier, and more successful. But behavioral genetics finds that parenting doesn’t make much difference to later-life outcomes; it’s mostly either genes or inscrutable random seeds plus noise. (A review of Brian Kaplan's Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids).
School is hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens those students are usually unable to leave. Has a lot of thought-provoking stuff like: The #1 reason why we fail to teach math: we present it as knowledge without telling kids it's a motor skill developed by practicing unseen actions in your head; And: A lot of people do not care about smart kids. Or they actively want them to suffer; The dread of school could be mitigated by 75 percent by simply letting children sleep in. Teenagers need significantly more sleep; without adequate amounts, they can become depressed and irritable.
Random
It’s not true that one should never form plurals using apostrophes. (OMG!). Per The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage: “Use apostrophes for plurals formed from single letters: He received A’s and B’s on his report card. Mind your p’s and q’s.”
Taste & Personality. A preference for sweetness is linked to neuroticism and agreeableness, whereas preferences for bitter and sour tastes are associated with antisocial personality traits, such as Machiavellianism. Spiciness preference is closely related to sensation-seeking, extraversion, and impulsivity.
The myths and misconceptions around MS Subbulakshmi, India’s most acclaimed musician. (An old one, by musician TM Krishna)
What/Who exactly is a blankface? He or she is often a mid-level bureaucrat, but not every bureaucrat is a blankface, and not every blankface is a bureaucrat.
This one is so close to home! The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing: Why do some people (me!) find certain sounds intolerable? A related one: Some misophoniacs say that they’re only triggered by specific people - usually those close to them. If some rando chews loudly, they’ll be mildly annoyed; if their brother does, they’ll flip out. Replace brother with wife, and I am there too.
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