Things I Read: 15 Jul – 03 Aug 2026

This one is a bit light. I think that reflects the craziness of the summer and how I have worked through the backlog of my Instapaper. I’ve also been reading actual books (see below) so maybe you should too :D.

People

• Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead

  Becoming the kind of parent you didn’t have a model for.

  These are amazing words and regardless of our actual lived experience, I think we all feel this way when we have children.

• Communities are not fungible

  Not only are communities not fungible, but JA makes it crystal clear how they differ from person to person inside the community because they are overlapping Dunbar circles. Before I left Twitter, I remember thinking that I must be using a different Twitter from everyone else because my experience was nothing like what I was hearing about. The same is now true for me on Mastodon.

Machines and Politics

• Opinion | The Environmental Case Against Data Centers Is Misguided

  Data centers should be held to the same environmental standards as any other project.

  Why is this even controversial? I also believe we should price consumables at the correct cost reflecting our view on their impact as well as their production. I realize this will increase costs for many, including low-income members of our society, so instead we should surface the subsidy as a real subsidy line item. People should understand what things cost and what they have received as support.

  For bonus points we can make the subsidy refundable to encourage people to conserve.

• Hyperrealist Datacenters And Potemkin McRibs | blarg

  I like it when an article finally acknowledges the power of smaller models for many uses when talking about the LLM Data Center bubble. If you choose to use LLMs start running some experiments with non-frontier models, whether cloud hosted or local, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

  While you’re reading this article, stay for the bonus McDonalds anecdotes. Per my daughter, as I am sad to admit, it has the best chicken nuggets a pork-market arbitraging real estate company can make.

• Opinion | Is France poorer than America? You don’t have to ‘walk around’ to know.

  This is such an American question. It’s like a reverse Tucker Carlson in a Russian grocery store. You know it is hard to toe the line when the best polish you can put on this turd of a proposition is, “[rural france is also] humdrum highways rather than picturesque public transit. The European endowment of beautiful architecture feels much richer than American acreage when you’re, well, walking around. That effect is magnified by lower crime and public disorder in Europe.” But yeah, let’s talk about raw dollars baby.

Recently Finished Books

I’ve been tracking my book reading on my blog, but it never gets surfaced anywhere. I’ve decided to start including them here. Head to my reading page to find detailed notes or reactions for each book, similar in style to this post.

And finally

• A pan that won’t let me rush dinner - Down the Road

  I’m learning that turning the burner higher doesn’t actually make dinner happen appreciably sooner. It just makes it easier to burn dinner. So I’m going to learn to go low and slow.

  I remember reading somewhere that you should almost never set a burner above medium. These days when I cook, I’m using gas :( - but low and slow has paid off. The other day I was cooking a chicken breast in our go-to nonstick IKEA skillet. I’d done basically no prep due to a child who hates flavor and hadn’t even tried to make it a similar thickness throughout. I wound up putting my skillet on too small of a burner, setting it to low, and hanging the pan half off the burner. This put the chicken on the off side recreating the indirect heat of a grill. I had juicy AF chicken. Suck it George Foreman!