Sometimes I like to listen to Korean pop music while I go through my background processes to kill the ones that shouldn’t be running anymore. You could say I’m a KPop Daemon Hunter.

I’m curious why there’s a drop in the number of girls wanting to not get married but boys have stayed basically constant. The survey definitely shows like women have a lower desire for children, but how much does the decline in the institution of marriage play into this rather than an underlying change in a desire for families?

Pew Research Center

More 12th grade boys than girls want to get married someday

67% of 12th graders say they’ll likely choose to get married someday, down from 80% in 1993. The decline reflects shifting views among girls.

PWAscore

PWAscore - PWA Browser Scorecards

Compare Progressive Web App capabilities across popular mobile browsers. See which browsers best support PWA features like Service Workers, Web App...

I’ve never realized what an ungodly hulking behemoth the modern web browser has become until reading through all the features required for PWAs.

Updated to macOS Tahoe. Of course Apple broke a whole bunch of scripting APIs that I use. Apparently you just can't get the currently playing song title in Apple Music with Applescript because fuck you I guess. Every update, I start to more seriously consider switching to Linux for my next laptop. I hate feeling like I'm a guest on my own computer begging for the ability to get access to the internal state of my own laptop.

The new Taylor Swift album feels like the songwriter version of computer scientists whiteboard masturbating. She spent so much time flaunting how clever she is at writing lyrics that she forgot to actually make good music. Everything just comes out sounding blandly floaty.

Urban Dictionary

Urban Dictionary: whiteboard masturbation

whiteboard masturbation: A term sometimes used in certain software engineering circles to refer to the excessive use of things like [object-oriente...

Just realized that all the icons in the macOS System Settings app change sizes when the window is frontmost vs not. Why in the world would this be helpful?

Tempo

Tempo: the blockchain for payments at scale

Tempo is a purpose-built, Layer 1 blockchain for payments, developed in partnership with leading fintechs and Fortune 500s. Tempo enables high-thro...

It’s 2021 and people are launching stablecoins again.

Manifold

Will the UN declare a famine in Gaza by 2030?

Resolved YES. Resolution criteria This market will resolve to "Yes" if, by December 31, 2030, the United Nations (UN) officially declares a famine...

Can't believe I got rug pulled by the UN. What a joke. I forecasted that the UN wouldn't declare a famine in Gaza because a real famine requires 2 deaths per 10k, which works out to ~420 deaths per day. The chances of this happening are insanely low and you've been brain rotted by your news feed if you think it is. What I failed to factor in was the possibility that the UN would just change its definition of what a famine is by removing the 2 deaths 10k requirement completely. The situation in Gaza is definitely bad, but focusing this much on what words we use to describe it (genocide, famine) is not helpful and distracts from the actual situation on the ground. Semantics are stupid, just focus on the facts.

Kinda can't believe Taylor is actually getting married. What will all those celebrity shows do now that they can't speculate on her love life?

Note to self: never ask an LLM for flirting suggestions. It'll take a while for capabilities to improve enough to become useful. Just wrote a Python script to extract messages from a conversation in iMessages, then fed it into an LLM to get feedback and suggestions as a test. After reading LLM flirting suggestions I think I might die of cringe. I have never felt such a strong urge to gag while reading non-NSFW text.

For all the other people who may have, like me, seen this meme graph all over the internet with everyone attributing it to their favorite pet theory for the decline of society, it turns out the data had to be tortured pretty hard to get this.

No, Conscientiousness Hasn't Collapsed Among Young People in Recent Years

How the Financial Times created a misleading meme and contributed to the firehose of nonsense on screen panic

I finally made a decision and took the Giving What We Can pledge. Instead of feeling helpless about the evil going on in the world, do something about it and improve the world as much as you can with what you have. Don't settle for giving to the charity that has the best marketing materials or the most emotional appeal, look at the numbers and give to the charities who are doing the most good for the least amount of money. Every dollar matters. Every person can easily save many lives every year. Make a difference and take the pledge.

Giving What We Can

100x your impact by finding and donating to the best charities. Learn about high-impact philanthropy, join an effective giving community, take a gi...

"Saruman believes that it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. I have found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love." - Gandalf

How to Leave Substack.

You Should Probably Leave Substack

You should probably leave Substack. Here’s why and how.

If you want to leave Substack because you don’t want to be beholden to a centralized platform, then great! That’s a decent reason to leave. But everyone whining about Substack not having tight censorship is silly. The only reason there’s censorship online is because of advertisers. Companies don’t want their names next to Nazi propaganda, which is fair. Substack is subscription based so there’s no point in all the pomp and show of censorship. Censorship is stupid, leaving Substack because you want Substack to decide what people can and cannot write is stupid.

Marginal REVOLUTION

Say it ain't so, Cecil... - Marginal REVOLUTION

New British cars may have to be fitted with breathalyser technology and black box-style recorders under Labour plans to align with EU vehicle safet...

I when walking the fine line between safety and privacy, I tend to come down on the side of privacy, but it does seem strange that breathalyzers aren’t required on cars. They’re not very privacy invasive and it seems like it would do a lot of good.

Towards Data Science

Practical text generation using GPT-2, LSTM and Markov Chain | Towards Data Science

Overview of word-level NLG models

Great reminder of how much goal posts change. The author of this article is showing a survey of different text generation methods in 2021 before ChatGPT and is impressed that GPT-2 can not only write mostly grammatically correct and logical sentences, but the model can use correct pronouns to refer to people ("her" when referring to "sister"). We've come a long way.

One of the best things you can do when you read something is to simply click links. That’s it. When an article makes a statement and has a link, just go ahead and click it and then start reading. Forcing myself to engage and research what I’m reading rather than passively consuming has had a lot of benefits. First, it lets you prune out people or sources you read that may seem trustworthy on the surface but are citing absolute crap to support claims. Second, reading more primary sources inoculates against a lot of lazy writing about “scientists say X”. You’ll quickly realize there’s a broad range of research credibility and rigor. Just because there’s a study that says something that doesn’t mean it’s true. Third, it’s just a good brain exercise. Force yourself to do hard things. Push back against the TikTok and social media induced stupor of consumption. Reading dense primary sources forces you to put some effort into comprehending what you’re reading. Too much content online is written to require as little effort as possible. Put some mental reps in and get effortful reading back into your daily routine.

https://archive.is/2025.07.17-225639/https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-jeffrey-epstein-birthday-letter-we-have-certain-things-in-common-f918d796 Is the whole Epstein fiasco what is finally going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for Trump’s cult of personality? The whole thing just continues to get more strange and muddled. According to the WSJ, Trump (along with a few of Epstein’s other close friends) wrote Epstein a bawdy letter on his birthday where he talks about their “shared secret”

Marginal REVOLUTION

The political culture/holiday culture that is French - Marginal REVOLUTION

The French government proposed cutting two public holidays per year to boost economic growth as part of a budget plan that it billed as a “moment...

It cracks me up that just like we argue over cuts to different government programs like entitlements or foreign aid you could also debate federal holiday cuts.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5402273-white-house-accepts-pepfar-exemption/ More good news! The best parts of USAID are being preserved. PEPFAR has been an incredibly cost effective program that’s saved over 26 million lives from AIDS.

Technical Difficulties

Mozilla Gfx Team Blog

Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141

After years in development, we will be releasing WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141! WebGPU gives web content a modern interface to the user’s ...

Finally getting WebGPU support in Firefox! Lets gooo! There’s all sorts of interesting applications you can build that require GPU access to be remotely performant that have been handicapped by Firefox being incredibly slow to support WebGPU.