One-third of Israeli Holocaust survivors live in poverty, advocates say
Saved
Abandoned babies found decomposing in Gaza hospital weeks after it was evacuated
May December
Haynes has here made a film that might seem comic to one, irretrievably tragic to another, possibly within the same scene, line reading, or surprising camera gesture—appropriate for a film about the derangement of living one’s life as an idea, an outline, an empty vessel on which others project expectations and judgments that only reflect their own biases.
On Cultivating Taste
Taste, by definition, is the ability to be decisive about what you like and what you don’t like, and exclusively seek out the first. In other words, good taste is a sign of good judgment. Want to have good taste? Get comfortable with saying ‘no’.
What I learned getting acquired by Google
While there were undoubtedly people who came in for the food, worked 3 hours a day, and enjoyed their early retirements, all the people I met were earnest, hard-working, and wanted to do great work.
What beat them down were the gauntlet of reviews, the frequent re-orgs, the institutional scar tissue from past failures, and the complexity of doing even simple things on the world stage. Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can.
What also got in the way were the people themselves - all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something, all the leaders who lacked the courage to speak the uncomfortable truth, and all the people that were hired without a clear project to work on, but must still be retained through promotion-worthy made-up work.
Another blocker to progress that I saw up close was the imbalance of a top heavy team. A team with multiple successful co-founders and 10-20 year Google veterans might sound like a recipe for great things, but it’s also a recipe for gridlock.
This structure might work if there are multiple areas to explore, clear goals, and strong autonomy to pursue those paths.
Good teams regularly pay down debt by cleaning things up on quieter days.
Just as real is process debt. A review added because of a launch gone wrong. A new legal check to guard against possible litigation. A section added to a document template. Layers accumulate over the years until you end up unable to release a new feature for months after it's ready because it's stuck between reviews, with an unclear path out.
Bottoms review – undercooked, unfunny teen romance
Opinion | Bernie Sanders: Justice for the Palestinians and Security for Israel
we must demand an immediate end to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, which is causing an enormous number of civilian casualties and is in violation of international law. Israel is at war with Hamas, not innocent Palestinian men, women and children. Israel cannot bomb an entire neighborhood to take out one Hamas target. We don’t know if this campaign has been effective in degrading Hamas’s military capabilities. But we do know that a reported 70 percent of the casualties are women and children, and that 104 U.N. aid workers and 53 journalists have been killed. That’s not acceptable.
Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party was explicitly formed on the premise that “between the Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty,” and the current coalition agreement reinforces that goal. This is not just ideology. The Israeli government has systematically pursued this goal. The last year saw record Israeli settlement growth in the West Bank, where more than 700,000 Israelis now live in areas that the United Nations and the United States agree are occupied territories. They have used state violence to back up this de facto annexation. Since Oct. 7, the United Nations reports that at least 208 Palestinians, including 53 children, have been killed by Israeli security forces and settlers. This cannot be allowed to continue.
The blank check approach must end. The United States must make clear that while we are friends of Israel, there are conditions to that friendship and that we cannot be complicit in actions that violate international law and our own sense of decency. That includes an end to indiscriminate bombing; a significant pause to bombing so that massive humanitarian assistance can come into the region; the right of displaced Gazans to return to their homes; no long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza; an end to settler violence in the West Bank and a freeze on settlement expansion; and a commitment to broad peace talks for a two-state solution in the wake of the war.
The problem of other minds
Making your heart bigger
the heart is a muscle: you can make it bigger by training it, and the bigger it gets the less it cares for symmetry or saving face. Instead of repetitions of lifting weights, you train your heart with repetitions of directing compassion at things, like that friend who's less available to see you than they used to be, or the crush who ghosted you after several nice dates.
someone saying no to you is your opportunity to show yourself who you really are. Because it strains your capacity, in the moment, to feel love. The moment when you hear sorry I'm booked the whole weekend once again when calling a friend about dinner plans. When you learn an old friend is in town and hasn’t reached out to see you. When you notice that your best friend is prioritizing their developing relationship to the detriment of your friendship.
The trouble with wisdom is that it's easy to forget. In my more sober moments I'm fully aware that we're all manifestations of the same thing, that however many followers or expensive things or famous friends you have, you are nothing more than a frail primate in a decaying body. I know that climbing any of these ladders brings a fleeting and unsatisfying happiness. But in the moment that someone says no, in the moment that someone I admire fails to show up when they had promised to, the world morphs back into something I know it isn't: this individuated, transactional competition. This zero-sum game that promises that if I just got a bit further ahead I’d be content and never feel bad about myself again.
The problem of long-term close friendships
Interesting to think of levels of alignment in life planning as something that helps distinguish levels of closeness in friendships. Also the continued theme of friends as family
“I yearn for best friends that I’ll still be best friends with in 30 years.”I was convinced that this must be possible because I had read the book A Little Life which follows a group of best friends from college until old age. Until that point I don’t think I had ever imagined—in that much detail—what it would be like to grow old with your friends, but I decided it was something I absolutely wanted.A year and a half later, this vision seems harder than ever. One best friend is in a relationship and is leaving the city soon, another best friend has become harder to reach; the roommates are still there but one of them is moving out soon too. Everyone is always moving somewhere new, dating someone new, working somewhere new.
People talk about how in the strongest friendships, even if you go on separate paths and only see each other once a year, it always feels the same and you can just pick up from where you left off. I appreciate these friendships, but I much prefer consistent presence over the long haul (studying together, cooking dinners, sharing memes) rather than annual hourlong catch-up calls and barely ever talking in between.
Am I willing to make major life decisions in partnership with my friends? To choose, together, which city (and which neighborhood) I’ll be living in, when I’ll settle down, how much I’ll prioritize my career? We are used to expecting this level of alignment out of a relationship, but not friendships.It seems like the only person you can rely on to be there indefinitely, and with whom you can build something long-term, is your partner, and this is nice, but I do find the concept of a nuclear family—two parents on their own raising a few kids in a suburban house—a little depressing, when contrasted with a bustling extended family, many of them living together in the same building, hosting boisterous family dinners and monthly trips to a cottage. How do you build that as an adult, when your actual extended family is on a different continent?
Americans need an extra $11,400 today just to afford the basics
How to succeed: don't take things for granted
I like to break down reality into different layers. There’s physical reality, biological reality, social reality, and emotional reality.
“Physical reality” includes not just abstract theories about physics but also our embodied intuitions of how the physical world works, e.g. that I can’t walk through a wall, travel backwards in time, or move clouds with my mind. These are assumptions I need not test repeatedly to see whether they’re still true
It’s safe to assume that you are going to age and die and that you need food and water to survive. But the parameters can be tuned quite a bit—some people get by with extreme fasting or very little sleep, and plenty of people think we’ll eventually cure aging, cancer, and other biological problems.
Social and emotional reality are the most malleable, and I think these are the areas where people take too many things for granted.
Remember that all of our rules, laws, and social conventions are made up. Even the literal concept of a corridor is something that a guy came up with in 1597.
it’s not just that there are exceptions to the pattern, it’s that the pattern applies to people in the past, and social reality is always changing.
In particular, social reality is changing more quickly than ever because of the internet. Most people still don’t appreciate how much power the internet gives us: for accessing information, for sharing ideas, for connecting with people who share your interests and goals.
Examples of social realities that people take for granted but which are subject to change (and have already changed a lot):
I need to go to college in order to have a well-paying career
I need to pay for a course in order to learn about X
The broadest form of this is “I need permission from someone with authority in order to do what I want to do”. I guess we can be forgiven for believing this, since this is what elementary school looked like for many of us: you had to get a hall pass in order to leave the classroom to drink water. So of course you’ll believe that “getting permission” is the default mode of navigating the world.
Feeling through emotional truths
To gain insight into emotional truths, Kasra recommends feeling into strong emotions rather than overthinking them. Some techniques include sentence completion exercises, imagining emotions as characters to dialogue with, focusing on body sensations, and identifying underlying beliefs.
In general it's adopting a mindset of curiosity rather than doubt when exploring one's emotions.
Your emotions are a signaling mechanism. They are your subconscious mind’s toolkit for protecting you from dangers, improving your circumstances, and navigating an otherwise incomprehensibly complex world. Every emotion has some adaptive purpose: fear keeps you safe; anger enforces your boundaries; sadness slows you down; joy speeds you up.
The first step towards living better is to recognize that your subconscious mind is trying to tell you things you don’t yet know (primarily through your emotions, but also via other channels like your dreams). A lot of people struggle to realize even this basic fact; they think of emotions as a disruption: a distraction from, say, their career development, or an impediment to their capacity to “be rational.”
your emotions are worth heeding because they carry wisdom your conscious mind doesn’t have access to. And at that point you must embark on the second step—the much harder step—of figuring out what it is that your mind is trying to tell you.
an attitude of curiosity rather than doubt. Embodiment rather than intellect. You find the answer by allowing yourself to be playful, generative, and spontaneous; not by being methodical, intentional, and constricted. Sit back and feel your way to the answer
For Hollywood, Chinese Villains Move Behind the Scenes
Illuminating: an illustrated guide to some of the world’s most remote lighthouses
Tumblr is downscaling after failing to ‘turn around’ the site
Tumblr has attempted a variety of new monetization strategies, including Live, a sponsored post feature called Blaze, an ad-free subscription, and a paid content feature called Post Plus. Their success has apparently been mixed. Mullenweg called Post Plus the subject of a viral “misinformation” campaign that suggested monetizing fan content could lead to lawsuits, producing a backlash that included — Mullenweg said — threats against creators who used it. “Since then we’ve gotten better at managing attacks and threats, with new tools and a bigger Trust & Safety team, but Post Plus never recovered,” he said.
Nibble and your appetite will grow
There’s a French expression I like:
L’appétit vient en mangeant
Appetite comes when you eat
Interview with Leo Chang, Staff Designer at Darkroom Studios, on Visual Design
There are certain design principles you can apply to this like composition, hierarchy, color theory, and so on, but to the regular consumer, it’s the gestalt of all your design decisions that ultimately makes an emotional connection. We know emotion is so much of what drives purchasing behavior so the more nebulous goal of visual design is often pulling those levers in just the right ratio to elicit a desired connection to your product.
ven something as foundational as increasing white space in your design can instantly improve a customer’s perception of your brand’s worth when it’s done intentionally.
almost all clients agree that they need better look and feel in their digital experience, that they are looking to add some type of emotional signal that’s missing. But when it comes time to accept changes that address those problems, I’ve had several instances where clients are resistant to solutions that depart too significantly from what they’re already comfortable with. Usually that reservation is overcome when I correlate the visual changes to the ways in which the user experience is improved and the resulting impact on business performance.
There will be also times when a client expresses to us that they’ve never been satisfied with their brand or website and they point to competitors that evoke certain emotional qualities that they are aspiring to capture. In those cases it’s quite rewarding to be able to translate those more nebulous feelings into concrete terminology that gives us specific visual principles to bring in or improve on.
Interview with Jeremy Elder on Visual Design
I think most of the clients knew that good design would provide value, but ultimately I think they thought of it as the expression of the passion that fueled their business to begin with. It was something that made their vision tangible. A way to package (for lack of better term) their product or value to their prospects or market.
In marketing, I think visual design is used to guide a decision, while in applications it’s to isolate a decision. A marketing site might have one task in a flow, while an application can have many. With marketing, I might see it once, so a more liberal use of color or embellishment drives a more memorable or emotional guidance. In an application I (potentially) use it more frequently and am more task driven than emotionally driven, so something more plain is less fatiguing over time.
the most successful tools do both well, and understand the complimentary relationship. Take Linear’s recent popularity in the design community for example. The app is considerably plainer than the marketing site, but there’s a common undercurrent and degree of polish that is present in both and when you use the application there’s a degree of subliminal appreciation for how the design is simplified.
I believe recent macOS and iPadOS updates directionally point towards touch interaction and easier context switching more than they point towards the importance of “glassmorphism” or a soft and friendly vibe with larger border radius. Similarly, the return of skeuomorphism can hint at the need for more affordance. Focusing on the lighting, material effect, noise, or composition without understanding why they’re being used just leads to chasing aesthetics, but not usability.
Jigsaw
Five Case Studies On Politicization
The Signal and the Corrective
A technical breakdown of 'narratives' and how they operate: narratives simplify issues by focusing on a main "signal" while ignoring other relevant "noise", and this affects discussions between those with opposing preferred signals. It goes into many examples across basically any kind of ideological or cultural divide.
AI summary:
- The article explores how different people can derive opposing narratives from the same set of facts, with each viewing their interpretation as the "signal" and opposing views as "noise"
- Key concepts:
- Signal: The core belief or narrative someone holds as fundamentally true
- Corrective: The moderating adjustments made to account for exceptions to the core belief
- Figure-ground inversion: How the same reality can be interpreted in opposite ways
- Examples of opposing narratives include:
- Government as public service vs. government as pork distribution
- Medical care as healing vs. medical care as harmful intervention
- Capitalism as wealth creation vs. capitalism as exploitation
- Nature vs. nurture in human behavior
- Science as gradual progress vs. science as paradigm shifts
- Communication dynamics:
- People are more likely to fall back on pure signals (without correctives) when:
- Discussions become abstract
- Communication bandwidth is limited
- Under stress or emotional pressure
- Speaking to unfamiliar audiences
- In hostile environments
- People are more likely to fall back on pure signals (without correctives) when:
- Persuasion insights:
- It's easier to add correctives to someone's existing signal than to completely change their core beliefs
- People must feel their fundamental views are respected before accepting criticism
- Acknowledging partial validity of opposing views is crucial for productive dialogue
- Problems in modern discourse:
- Online debates often lack real-world consequences
- When there's no need for cooperation, people prefer conquest over consensus
- Lack of real relationships reduces incentives for civility and understanding
- The author notes that while most people hold moderate views with both signals and correctives, fundamental differences can be masked when discussing specific policies but become apparent in discussions of general principles
- The piece maintains a thoughtful, analytical tone while acknowledging the complexity and challenges of human communication and belief systems
- The author expresses personal examples and vulnerability in describing how they themselves react differently to criticism based on whether it comes from those who share their fundamental values
narratives contradicting each other means that they simplify and generalize in different ways and assign goodness and badness to things in opposite directions. While that might look like contradiction it isn’t, because generalizations and value judgments aren’t strictly facts about the world. As a consequence, the more abstracted and value-laden narratives get the more they can contradict each other without any of them being “wrong”.
“The free market is extremely powerful and will work best as a rule, but there are a few outliers where it won’t, and some people will be hurt so we should have a social safety net to contain the bad side effects.”
and
“Capitalism is morally corrupt and rewards selfishness and greed. An economy run for the people by the people is a moral imperative, but planned economies don’t seem to work very well in practice so we need the market to fuel prosperity even if it is distasteful.”
. . . have very different fundamental attitudes but may well come down quite close to each other in terms of supported policies. If you model them as having one “main signal” (basic attitude) paired with a corrective to account for how the basic attitude fails to match reality perfectly, then this kind of difference is understated when the conversation is about specific issues (because then signals plus correctives are compared and the correctives bring “opposite” people closer together) but overstated when the conversation is about general principles — because then it’s only about the signal.
I’ve said that when discussions get abstract and general people tend to go back to their main signals and ignore correctives, which makes participants seem further apart than they really are. The same thing happens when the communication bandwidth is low for some reason. When dealing with complex matters human communication tends not to be super efficient in the first place and if something makes subtlety extra hard — like a 140 character limit, only a few minutes to type during a bathroom break at work, little to no context or a noisy discourse environment — you’re going to fall back to simpler, more basic messages.
Internal factors matter too. When you’re stressed, don’t have time to think, don’t know the person you’re talking to and don’t really care about them, when emotions are heated, when you feel attacked, when an audience is watching and you can’t look weak, or when you smell blood in the water, then you’re going to go simple, you’re going to go basic, you’re going to push in a direction rather than trying to hit a target. And whoever you’re talking to is going to do the same. You both fall back in different directions, exactly when you shouldn’t.
It makes sense to think of complex disagreements as not about single facts but about narratives made up of generalizations, abstractions and interpretations of many facts, most of which aren’t currently on the table. And the status of our favorite narratives matters to us, because they say what’s happening, who the heroes are and who the villains are, what’s matters and what doesn’t, who owes and who is owed. Most of us, when not in our very best moods, will make sure our most cherished narratives are safe before we let any others thrive.
Most people will accept that their main signals have correctives, but they will not accept that their main signals have no validity or legitimacy. It’s a lot easier to install a corrective in someone than it is to dislodge their main signal (and that might later lead to a more fundamental change of heart) — but to do that you must refrain from threatening the signal because that makes people defensive. And it’s not so hard. Listen and acknowledge that their view has greater than zero validity.
In an ideal world, any argumentation would start with laying out its own background assumptions, including stating if what it says should be taken as a corrective on top of its opposite or a complete rejection of it.
Here’s what actually happens to all your online shopping returns
Profile: haswell | Hacker News
For most of my career, I've been a full-stack dev, tinkerer, technologist, jack-of-all-trades type of person. Currently on sabbatical while I pivot to something...different.Consequentialist-ish, currently worried about the state of tech and its impact on society, and figuring out how to do something useful about it, mostly focused on personal/individual habit change.
The Effective Altruism Shell Game 2.0
Criticism of the Effective Altruism movement and its griftiness
Biden Administration to Overhaul Welfare Following ProPublica Reporting
Israel’s Insidious Narrative About Palestinian Prisoners
101. Living vicariously through my messy love life
Snapchat, The Browser Company, and picking winning founders with Ellis Hamburger
Is the founder focused on a market opportunity, or a way that they want to change and improve our daily lives? It’s the difference between pitching the tool vs. the benefit. The best founders are always focused on the benefit—they’re putting themselves in the shoes of the consumer, instead of just building something because they can.
On how to identify a winning founder: “Great, thoughtful design. Great design tells you if the founder is focused, has good taste, understands the simplicity required to connect with the average consumer, and has a strong, specific point of view on what they’re building. It has always been my barometer. Great design is harder to identify than it sounds, though.”
Charles Melton on How ‘Riverdale,’ Heath Ledger, and His Childhood Informed His ‘May December’ Triumph
Yeah. I was thinking a lot about repression, and just not so much just the feeling, but how that would manifest through the body. How you can communicate so much by so little. If you see someone in the corner kind with their shoulders hunched and walking around and keeping to themself and not really taking up so much space, you feel sympathy for them. You feel kind of bad for them.