Anti-work | Go Make Things
But this obsession with hard work as a virtue, as a good and righteous thing to do, the glorification of toil and sweat and labor… that’s a tool the wealthy who don’t work for a living use to oppress those who do.
Link tags: life
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The End : Focal Curve
I can’t remember the last time a blog post resonated with me this much.
Craig’s criteria on his job search:
- One: fuck offices
- Two: fuck AI
- Three: fuck React
And his conclusion:
Fuck work
The Mythology Of Conscious AI
This superb essay by Anil Seth won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition.
The future history of AI is not yet written. There is no inevitability to the directions AI might yet take. To think otherwise is to be overly constrained by our conceptual inheritance, weighed down by the baggage of bad science fiction and submissive to the self-serving narrative of tech companies laboring to make it to the next financial quarter. Time is short, but collectively we can still decide which kinds of AI we really want and which we really don’t.
22 – 26 September 2025 – Walknotes
God, I love the way that Denise writes:
On the train there’s an ad for Adobe Express: “Commercially safe AI. Trusted results”. The ad shows a photo slotting in to a design. Commercially safe for everyone but photographers and designers. I couldn’t get a seat facing forwards, so I head backwards into the future like some half-arsed AI metaphor.
gilest.org: A chat with 19-year-old me
I love this conversation.
Figure and ground • Buttondown
Man, this resonates:
At one end, you prioritise your own interests. Slap on the SPF and enjoy the cricket; ignore the emails; nip to Paris for the day. But egocentrism erodes social goods. It harms other people. So perhaps you reject it and skew the other way, anchoring your wellbeing to the trajectory of the world. But that undertow will easily drown you. The beneficence of caring only about others seems noble, but in truth few of us can endure that level of self-sacrifice. Total empathy harms you. And so most of us stumble in the fog between these extremes, recoiling from either end when the shame or the sadness becomes too much to bear. I plug away at my pleasant life with heartache for what’s happening to us. Perhaps you feel similarly, smiling but seconds from tears.
Beach daydreams, lost at sea (Interconnected)
Matt’s beach thoughts are like a satisfying susurrus in my RSS reader.
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad | The Orwell Foundation
After the sort of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen.
George Orwell on the coming of spring during the darkest of times:
It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
My Life in Weeks by Gina Trapani
This is one way of putting things into perspective.
Conway’s Game of Hope
A beautifully Borgesian fable.
Against Scale
Claire L. Evans has written a beautiful piece on the difference between growth and scalability:
Life is nonhierarchical, and it shirks top-down control. But scalability relies on hierarchy, on the isolation of elements stripped of history and context. It is predicated on the assumption that nature is little more than a raw material to be processed and commodified until it is spent. This is, of course, unsustainable — at any scale.
Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
This short story feels like a prequel to Maneki Neko.
A very simple rule
I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime.
A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived | Psyche Ideas
But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’.
This reminds me of that post by Winnie Lim I linked to a while back.
Life Universe
A fractal version of Conway’s Game Of Life: keep zooming out …forever!
Little Rules About Big Things · Collab Fund
Pessimism always sounds smarter than optimism because optimism sounds like a sales pitch while pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.
I usually hate these kinds of lists of bumper-sticker aphorisms but some of these have me pondering my own work, like this one:
People learn when they’re surprised. Not when they read the right answer, or are told they’re doing it wrong, but when they experience a gap between expectations and reality.
Or this:
There are two types of information: stuff you’ll still care about in the future, and stuff that matters less and less over time. Long-term vs. expiring knowledge.
Fermented Code: Modelling the Microbial Through Miso - Serpentine Galleries
Y’know, I started reading this great piece by Claire L. Evans thinking about its connections to systems thinking, but I ended up thinking more about prototyping. And microbes.
Winnie Lim » on leading a purposeless life
💯
I think it is beautiful if people have a purpose. But it should be valid to lead a purposeless life too. … Maybe it is okay to not pursue potential and just be okay with being.
The Technium: 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known
I’m not usually that keen on lists of pithy aphorisms but some of these really resonated…
- If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them a dollar.
- Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.
- The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I dont need to write this down because I will remember it.”
- Buy used books. They have the same words as the new ones. Also libraries.
- You can be whatever you want, so be the person who ends meetings early.
- It’s thrilling to be extremely polite to rude strangers.