Links: February 9, 2025

How to Weather the Storm

Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise. Follow people who are engaged in your community, follow people who are engaged in helping others, follow people who are posting pictures of their new puppy because puppies are awesome, follow artists making cool weird shit, follow people who are creating new stages. Stages where you are welcome. Stages built on love and kindness and inclusion. Stages where the audience can take a turn getting up there as well and tell their story. And yes, follow some trusted news sources, and double check their shit with a second news source.

In a Tiny Japanese Town, Artisans Are Crafting Some of the Best Turntable Needles on Earth

Now, just months before 28 million visitors begin to descend on Osaka for the World Expo 2025, JICO is hoping to attract that newfound audience to the tiny, far-flung town of Hamasaka to experience a listening room where guests are encouraged to bring their own vinyl for a two-and-a-half-hour private session on one of the finest hi-fi systems in the country. The idea is that those visitors will not only listen to recorded music in its purest form, but also do their part to spare the city from the dangers of extinction that is facing so much of small-town Japan.

Weekly Dose of Optimism #130

NanoCas is a newly designed tiny CRISPR system, about one-third the size of standard CRISPR (Cas9), making it small enough to fit into a single AAV delivery vector. An AAV delivery vector is a harmless virus used to deliver genetic material into cells for gene therapy. The big breakthrough with NanoCas is that its ability to fit into a single AAV is that it allows gene editing to reach muscle and heart tissues, not just the liver.

What's going to happen to Ukraine now?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 provided us with a moment of moral clarity. A powerful nation launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion of a weaker neighbor that didn’t threaten it at all. Instead of capitulating, the people of the invaded nation — with a little help from the free nations of the West — stood up and fought to defend their homes, their families, and their way of life. It was as simple a tale of right and wrong as you could find in Hollywood. And yet over the next two years, much of the American right wing managed to convince themselves otherwise. Cobbling together a counter-narrative from sources as diverse as Noam Chomsky and John Mearsheimer, they blamed Ukraine for provoking its own invasion — claiming that Russia was threatened by the specter of NATO expansion, arguing that a powerful country like Russia deserved to control its own “sphere of influence”, intimating that parts of Ukraine might as well be Russian, and accusing Ukraine and its leaders of leeching off of American goodwill. This inversion of common-sense morality — the idea that powerful nations deserve to be able to conquer weaker ones unopposed, and that regular people defending their homes and families are worthy of contempt — was an utterly shameful display, and largely failed to convince the American people. But it did convince a critical mass of Republicans, and now that Trump has won the election, it’s clear that the era of dependable American support for Ukraine is over.

And yet Finland was never absorbed into the Soviet Union. As time went on, its relationship with the West grew and deepened, and it drifted slowly away from the Soviet orbit. As of 2025 — 34 years after the Soviet Union fell — Finland is a rich, democratic, and fiercely independent nation. It’s also in NATO. In a very real way, the Winter War and the Continuation War were Finland’s war of independence from Russia. Finland may have lost the wars in a tactical sense, but in terms of the broader arc of history, it was an enduring victory. If the Ukraine war ended like Finland’s wars, with territorial losses and promises not to join NATO, but with independence and democracy preserved, it will represent a tactical loss but a great strategic victory for Ukraine. It will all but ensure that Ukraine, like Finland after 1944, remains an independent nation into the foreseeable future.

Minimum Levels of Stress

Imagine a fictional society that has unlimited wealth, unlimited health, and permanent peace. Would they be overflowing with joy? Probably not. I think their defining characteristic would be how trivial and absurd their grievances would be.

The Era of Scaling Without Growing

Small teams will gain superpowers once limited to just the world’s largest organizations — from how marketing is conducted and inventory is managed, to transcending the constraints of geography and language. As a result, small teams will increasingly be able to run — and compete with — big businesses. Notably, this trend will not only be powered by new AI tools that allow teams to stay small, but also by a shift in consumer preferences toward human-crafted brands and experiences (the magic that a business often compromises as it scales their team).

Earth to Lina Khan

What she fails to mention here is a complete and utter lack of understanding about the second order effects of her moves. Is blocking some M&A a good thing? Undoubtedly, when warranted. But by effectively blocking it all, the chilling effect had all kinds of unnatural effects on the market. And that ultimately hurt not just the VCs looking for exits, it hurt the startups doing the same. And it created a situation where fewer deals were getting done and as such, fewer companies were being started. This, incidentally, undoubtedly led to more people staying in their Big Tech jobs rather than striking out on their own to try to strike it big. The risk became too high with the only viable outcome an IPO — oh and by the way, that window was also shut due to some of this regulation!

‘Don’t Believe Him’

It is easy and quick, often instantaneous, to destroy things. It is hard and slow work to build new things, and often even harder and slower work to improve existing ones.

The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified

“It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”

"All your questions about the pandemic, answered. Sort of."

The People (P): So there’s no plan.

Answer (A): Having no plan is the plan! Haven’t you been listening? Plans are for commies and the Danish. Here we do it fast and loose and dumb and wrong, and occasionally we have a man who manufactures pillows come to the White House to show the president encouraging texts. It all works! Eighteen months, 800,000 deaths, no plan, states bidding against states for medicine and equipment, you’re on your own, plans are lame.

P: I’m going to lie down. I don’t feel good.

A: Should we sing a patriotic song? I feel like our forebears would be so proud of us now. It’s just like how we all pulled together in World War II, every element of society, from the White House to Rosie the Riveter, with common purpose and shared sacrifice. This is just like that, except instead of coordination, we have competition, and instead of common cause, we have acrimony and chaos. Instead of fireside chats, F.D.R. and Churchill, we have tweets, Lysol and Ron DeSantis. Other than that, it’s exactly the same.

"Greet terror with the serenity of the enlightened."

For most of us, it is almost impossible to comprehend the ferocity and regularity with which life was upended during the first half of the 20th century. Plague and conflict emerged on an epic scale, again and again. Loss and restriction were routine; disaster was its own season...

When catastrophe is sequential, it eventually trains its survivors to greet terror with the serenity of the enlightened.

"Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance"

Required reading:

For the countries where the coronavirus is already here, the options are clear.

On one side, countries can go the mitigation route: create a massive epidemic, overwhelm the healthcare system, drive the death of millions of people, and release new mutations of this virus in the wild.

On the other, countries can fight. They can lock down for a few weeks to buy us time, create an educated action plan, and control this virus until we have a vaccine.

Governments around the world today, including some such as the US, the UK, Switzerland or Netherlands have so far chosen the mitigation path.

That means they’re giving up without a fight. They see other countries having successfully fought this, but they say: “We can’t do that!”

What if Churchill had said the same thing? “Nazis are already everywhere in Europe. We can’t fight them. Let’s just give up.” This is what many governments around the world are doing today. They’re not giving you a chance to fight this. You have to demand it.

“Inside China’s All-Out War on the Coronavirus“

Riveting New York Times interview by Donald G. McNeil Jr. with Dr. Bruce Aylward of the WHO about his experience in China observing the COVID-19 response:

The best hospitals were designated just for Covid, severe and critical. All elective surgeries were postponed. Patients were moved. Other hospitals were designated just for routine care: women still have to give birth, people still suffer trauma and heart attacks. They built two new hospitals, and they rebuilt hospitals...

The real case fatality rate is probably what it is outside Hubei Province, somewhere between 1 and 2 percent...

So saying 80 percent of all cases are mild doesn’t mean what we thought.
“Mild” was a positive test, fever, cough — maybe even pneumonia, but not needing oxygen. “Severe” was breathing rate up and oxygen saturation down, so needing oxygen or a ventilator. “Critical” was respiratory failure or multi-organ failure...I’m Canadian. This is the Wayne Gretzky of viruses — people didn’t think it was big enough or fast enough to have the impact it does...

Journalists also say, “Well, they’re only acting out of fear of the government,” as if it’s some evil fire-breathing regime that eats babies. I talked to lots of people outside the system — in hotels, on trains, in the streets at night. They’re mobilized, like in a war, and it’s fear of the virus that was driving them. They really saw themselves as on the front lines of protecting the rest of China. And the world.

The U.S. is woefully under-prepared by comparison. This will go down as a damning systemic and moral failure of American leadership. I’d also wager that it serves as a canary in the coal mine vis-à-vis our global leadership relative to China. And this will not be the last mass epidemic.

"Musicians Algorithmically Generate Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain"

🤯

Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued.

Programmer, musician, and copyright attorney Damien Riehl, along with fellow musician/programmer Noah Rubin, sought to stop copyright lawsuits that they believe stifle the creative freedom of artists...

To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second.

Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it's considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.

"Under copyright law, numbers are facts, and under copyright law, facts either have thin copyright, almost no copyright, or no copyright at all," Riehl explained in the talk. "So maybe if these numbers have existed since the beginning of time and we're just plucking them out, maybe melodies are just math, which is just facts, which is not copyrightable."

All of the melodies they've generated, as well as the code for the algorithm that generated them, are available as open-source materials on Github and the datasets are on Internet Archive.

"Why time management is ruining our lives"

At the very bottom of our anxious urge to manage time better...it’s not hard to discern a familiar motive: the fear of death. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel has put it, on any meaningful timescale other than human life itself – that of the planet, say, or the cosmos – “we will all be dead any minute”. No wonder we are so drawn to the problem of how to make better use of our days: if we could solve it, we could avoid the feeling, in Seneca’s words, of finding life at an end just when we were getting ready to live. To die with the sense of nothing left undone: it’s nothing less than the promise of immortality by other means.

But the modern zeal for personal productivity, rooted in Taylor’s philosophy of efficiency, takes things several significant steps further. If only we could find the right techniques and apply enough self-discipline, it suggests, we could know that we were fitting everything important in, and could feel happy at last. It is up to us – indeed, it is our obligation – to maximise our productivity. This is a convenient ideology from the point of view of those who stand to profit from our working harder, and our increased capacity for consumer spending. But it also functions as a form of psychological avoidance. The more you can convince yourself that you need never make difficult choices – because there will be enough time for everything – the less you will feel obliged to ask yourself whether the life you are choosing is the right one.

Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness. And as such, it serves the same psychological role that busyness has always served: to keep us sufficiently distracted that we don’t have to ask ourselves potentially terrifying questions about how we are spending our days. “How we labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, in what reads like a foreshadowing of our present circumstances. “Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

You can seek to impose order on your inbox all you like – but eventually you’ll need to confront the fact that the deluge of messages, and the urge you feel to get them all dealt with, aren’t really about technology. They’re manifestations of larger, more personal dilemmas. Which paths will you pursue, and which will you abandon? Which relationships will you prioritise, during your shockingly limited lifespan, and who will you resign yourself to disappointing? What matters?

"Hopeful Images From 2019"

2019 has been another year filled with news stories and photos that can often be difficult or disturbing to view. I’ve made it an annual tradition, after rounding up the “news photos of the year,” to compose an essay of uplifting images from the past 12 months—an effort to seek out and recognize some of the abundant joy and kindness present in the world around us. The following are images from the past year of personal victories, families and friends at play, expressions of love and compassion, volunteers at work, assistance being given to those in need, or simply small and pleasant moments.
“American and Mexican families play on seesaws installed through the barrier along the Mexican border with U.S. in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on July 28, 2019.” Luis Torres / AFP / Getty

“American and Mexican families play on seesaws installed through the barrier along the Mexican border with U.S. in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on July 28, 2019.”
Luis Torres / AFP / Getty

Mexico 68

I love the iconography for Mexico City’s metro system. This 99% Invisible podcast explores the history of these icons, their evolution from Lance Wyman’s work on the graphic design campaign for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, and how local activists co-opted the campaign to bring attention to police brutality:

Between the logo, the typeface, the colors and icons, Wyman created a visual identity that saturated the whole city. It was everywhere…The 1968 Olympics were decreed “Los juegos de la Paz” (“The Games of Peace”). So Wyman designed a little outline of a dove, which shop owners all over the city had been given to stick in their windows…Students went around the city spraying a small burst of bright red paint over those doves in all the shop windows, to make it look like the dove had been shot. They were playing with the propaganda of the Olympics and hinting at a darker political reality.

Roma also brings this period to life in stunning and tragic detail.