The big question for the Dems seems to be whether they can produce a new candidate that won't be another Dukakis. Really, what I don't understand is how low the Dems have to be in the polls and how bad their demographic outlook has to become for them for them to wake up and change course.

My dislike of Tesla has been consistent since reading Ashlee Vance's book, but if you'd told me two years ago that even electric cars can become a MAGA shibboleth I would've been very surprised.

We’ve been dog-and-housesitting for a few days for a good friend who’s away. It’s the kind of dog that excitedly comes running up to you when you come back from getting your phone upstairs for a sec. We did this dogsitting last year too, but this time around he’s noticeably more chill and listens better.

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Some ideas just keep coming back, and for me it’s the idea that I should start a (video) podcast about in depth topics my field…there’s like two that exist and both of them suck. But then I’d be Yet Another Guy with a Podcast.

Maybe we should redefine AI as Artificial Interface. I think we’re finding out as we go that the scope of the word “systems” in your sentence can encompass a lot - it’s not just getting a recipe into Notion, it’s also starting to become useful as an interface between my notes and my email, or between a corpus of academic papers and my project outline. I’m tempted to start to record more meetings (or make voice notes after each?) just so I can create the data I need to become useful later.

Extrapolating once gets me to wonder how much more useful OpenAI’s Deep Research would be if it would have access to all academic papers instead of just Google results. “I’ve found 726 relevant papers to your inquiry, do you want to pay $118 for me to access them once?” Reminds me of the people who used to shout “data is the new gold!!1!” years ago. Like, hell, as a government we have decades of letters, research, data, notes and reports all just gathering dust because there only interface on it is tedious, laborious, expensive, or all of the above.

Extrapolating twice is what I’ve seen some tech bros do, where they are dreaming of the day when everything they say and everything they do is quietly monitored just so they create a wealth of data to query or dive into later. There are now people who have two years of (personal) conversations with ChatGPT, which they can use with its memory feature to do [shit like this][https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1guygcv/comment/ly3b4bz/). But somewhere here is a Rubicon I’m not willing to cross.

I’ve been enjoying cooking more lately! Found a Whole Foods-esque home delivery grocer with a spectacular assortment of good quality & organic ingredients. Finally bit the bullet and bought two carbon steel pans to add to my enameled Dutch oven and stainless steel pan. I spent a Saturday afternoon seasoning them and so far, they’ve been great at their job. Mostly I’m glad I can now cook without any nonstick pans.

As per recipes, Rukmini Iyer is fantastic. I’m also still exploring NYT’s recipes so if y’all have veggie/vegan recipes that you love lemme know, as I’m now trying to cook three new meals a week.

I also built an AI bot to copy all recipes (physical or digital) and throw it into a Notion cookbook I’m building. Have also been playing around with tools like Cursor and Wispr. I’m still regularly surprised at its simultaneous stupidity and genius. But I do feel AI slowly creeping into the useful territory.

Have you been able to get the UPF book already from the library? I’m curious whether you think it’s garbage or not, it also has a part about the GRAS loophole being bad (like every industry self-regulation of safety inevitably is).

To me there is not a very large difference between "kindness & handouts" and

The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government and markets to make sure there is enough of it.

The reason I shared this is because to me, it represents a line of thinking I keep seeing more and more on the left: deregulating to enable growth and progress. This is/was in my mind a sternly right-wing idea. Deregulation still is, but I hear calls for reforming regulation more and more from the left, not the right.

As a government bureaucrat myself now, I'm noticing I'm becoming more receptive to the idea that a rainforest of well intentioned regulations can ultimately make it too hard, too expensive, or even impossible to build things or make things work. We have been adding hurdles and my impression is that it wouldn't hurt less than the status quo to have the pendulum swing the other way for a while. I'm not under the illusion that it will reduce grift and corruption. The DOGE bulldozer is arguably the purest distillation of said corruption.

Now I'm also not blind to the advantages that have been made in the past decades through regulatory improvements/additions. I am however keenly aware (slash worried) that we have lost focus away from what gets us to better results and instead have put too much focus on improving the process instead. The price per mile of new rail (from high speed to local tram tracks) varies wildly. It's not just because of corruption, not just because of technical differences, but for a significant part it is the regulatory process that takes an ungodly amount of paperwork to wade through.

An example over here is the Friesenbrücke. A single, rural railway bridge got hit by a cargo ship in 2015, the primary railway corridor between the Netherlands and Germany in that area. After eight years it's demolished. The estimated date of finishing construction is this year, so more than a decade after it was hit. It was first estimated to cost €48M, later €66M; now, the total costs have ballooned to well over €200M. The slowness and expensiveness was because it had to comply with more laws and requirements than a simple replacement. On the one hand, that's great, now you've accidentally made this bridge future-proof. On the other hand, it is now par for the course now that these kinds of projects balloon in time and money. We shrug and go "oh well that's just what infrastructure is these days".

But the more expensive it is to do anything, the less we do of it, there's no way around it. We used to have multiple large rail projects ongoing at any time. December marked the first time the Netherlands has zero new rail being built for a while - everything we do is replacing or removing existing infrastructure. I think the two are related.

There was a quickly put down (by VCs) movement by a central banker to call VC’s locusts. I think we should bring that back.

What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left the young locusts have eaten; what the young locusts have left other locusts have eaten.

I’ve had some great regional foods across Europe (just discovered the wonder of Tiroler Gröstl this week), but what I was gettting at with ‘cuisine’ is a generally accepted body of recipes that are a cornerstone of the national culture. You think of Germany and you think of sauerkraut and currywurst. Things you’d be able to eat every day of the week. The Dutch word for cuisine is just “kitchen”, as in the meals you make in the kitchen. I love me some hutspot or snert but is Dutch aren’t able to fill a meal plan properly, I’d argue.

And to also answer kleinbl00, decent is the wrong word, because yeah most cuisines are fine for most people. What I meant is “good enough to be up there with the best cuisines around the globe”. Which is what you do hear from Brits from time to time.

The way I see it? The only countries this side of the pond who can honestly proclaim to have decent cuisine are the Italians and the French. There’s a B-tier of tryhards and then aaaaalllll the way down are the “we don’t have cuisines but we made some weird snacks and sweets?” and that’s us, Belgians, the Nordics. This D-tier is what the British aspire to.

Y’all over there have gone “we don’t do cuisine but we are the Children of God and the Lord has given us Sugars and Oils and the Hands and Wits to Create so by God are we gonna use them well (plusamassivefoodindustry)” and it has resulted in Good Shit that is also more often than not Unhealthy / Unpure for our small Europotato minds.

But it beats the shit out of the British.

you eat those for BREAKFAST?!

You might be British if…you think beans on toast is a perfectly acceptable breakfast food but you mock the Dutch for their hagelslag.

Dutch is easier than you think! Just pretend you’re a drunk German, learn “gezellig”, “stroopwafel”, “hagelslag” and you’ll be 87% of the way there.

Great read. I feel bad for the journalist having to read all of their 100K+ words of pseudoincellectual garbage.

Personally I’m still amazed that these supposedly luminary AI doomers can all believe we need to prevent AI from going rogue in a way that will end humanity, without actually proving that’s even possible in the first place. Like, yeah sure it can make bad API calls and let’s prevent that from happening. But so can any adversary and we’re still not doomed yet by the existence of Russia.

Greetings from Tyrol. Skiing is going well, for me at least because my wife is still not recovered from a flu that knocked 3kg in a day of off her last week. (The same one I had three weeks ago.) Her recovery seemed good, but then she backslid and she has ups and downs ever since. Seems to be part of this flu because I heard multiple colleagues with the same wobbly recovery process. She’s doing better now but remains low in energy…maybe there’s a small bit of skiing for her on our last day tomorrow, if only to have tried it. It feels unfair, I’m a casual skier who’s content after a day or two, while she’d been looking forward to it a lot.

At least our apartment’s really nice. It even has a 4-person private sauna which I’ve made good use of every day we’ve been here.

In general I’m really happy about this break, it wasn’t that I was craving it but the mountains, skiing, family time and getting away from most news for a while feels very nice.

p.s. if y’all could help a European out and help maintain NATO, that’d be nice.

Oh man I had to look it up, but my test results for CEFR language levels as part of applying for studying abroad a decade ago were “C1/C2” (so some parts C2, some C1). Probably C1 in writing and C2 in verbal skills. That English exam was one of the hardest English tests I’ve done and I’d been learning English for 2/3rds of my life by then. (At age seven, my Pokémon Gold language was set to English and I got through that by asking my mom what the words meant.)

Were you also slammed with multiple languages in high school or is that not a small-European-country-with-important-neig ours-thing? One year I had simultaneous lessons in Dutch, German, English, French, Latin & Greek - none of my own volition. Dropped three of them as fast as I could. I wouldn’t call myself a polyglot even back then, as a language studied but never immersed is not a language you really know. At the very least the breadth gave me a deep understanding of language structure and Latin is like the patient zero for a lot of structures and a lotta fancy-schmanzy words.

As someone who acquired a nerd helmet over Christmas, and has peered into Horizon Worlds out of morbid curiosity...yeah it's just not that interesting. You'd never guess there were billions at stake from the end product: it is ugly, it is boring, it only barely tries to make something happen. Friggin' Second Life had more going for it than this.

My pet theory is that some Meta execs have seen the numbers VRChat has been doing and keep pointing to it as if it's something they can achieve, too. This mini-doc is more than two years old, but I don't think much has changed - VRChat is a place for people who are uncomfortable in normal social environments to feel more comfortable hanging out. It isn't for normies and it will never be.

The real problems under Meta's endeavor is that their prices are eliminating almost all competition, whilst also being the only one in the VR space to essentially abandon developers, in a space where developers have to take enormous gambles to even operate. Friend of a friend went to the largest VR conference last year. Meta was the one with the biggest stand; but was the one stand where developers could not talk to any hardware or software employees, because they staffed their plaza with cheap students instead.

I'm also on a bit of a cooking spree. Spent the day today seasoning my first carbon steel skillets, hopefully this also pushes my wife over the threshold where we never cook in nonstick ever again. Bought some new baking tins and knifes and treated myself to Good Knifes for a change. And I made the NYT beans that Reddit is going nuts over.

They're really good! I thought the arugola would kill it, but this is the first time in a long while I've loved arugola. Swapped the heavy cream for 30% fat coconut milk to make it vegan, didn't seem to impact the dish at all.

Been pushing myself physically over the past weeks (in a good way!) as I've joined a running course and have been getting ski lessons in preparation for going to Austria next week. It's been really great to move up the learning curve multiple times a week, learning proper techniques from good teachers and seeing real progress. Makes the sore legs worth it.

Today my biggest project of the past year is coming to fruition, a large research study that's finally being published and sent to the assembly (or parliament? council?) I don't know what the US equivalent is). It's a guess what the politicians will think of it, but I've done my best and I'm proud of what's been done. The process of submitting it to the assembly has also been...informative, a mix of crunchy bureaucracy and vague tribal norms that people disagree on entirely.

The book Ultra Processed People by Chris Tulleken, which I just finished and has to be the source of this article's knowledge at least indirectly, goes much more into detail as to what the problem is. It concludes with the fairly straightforward solution to personally just avoid ingredients you don't have in your pantry. It's worth the try to cut UPFs mostly, but not entirerly for a month (e.g. 80%) and see what it does to you. That's what I am doing now.

As for more structural solutions it points to industry-independent government regulations. As long as the food industry is dictated only/largely by maximizing shareholder profit, this problem isn't going to go away. We need to regulate food more like we regulate tobacco and pharma. Anything else done by the for-profit food industry is window dressing - there is a long history of the food industry simply replacing whatever bad ingredient we now hate with another we haven't studied enough yet to hate.

Good to hear again from you pabs!

Anyway, it all sounds simple and great when I put it on paper, but it was a whole lot of fuckery I put myself through the last near-decade, so I guess my biggest fear is that my memory of the important details and lessons-learned will fade before I really get a chance to leverage them in my forthcoming civilian life.

I'd urge you to write it down. Or shout half an hour every day into your phone's dictation tool. Not to create something coherent now, but to allow yourself to let go of the thoughts and experiences. And who knows, maybe a decade from now you you'd like to have something to return to.

900 days is a long time. Let's see. Last time around I was just over a bout of long covid and we moved into our first home. Little did I know LC would come back that winter with a vengeance. At rock bottom I was unable to shower because I lost the stamina to stand for longer than two minutes at a time. I went through extensive physical therapy which I still am grateful for for putting me on a long, arduous path of recovery. Just as I was making some amount of physical progress, my company fell apart at the seams and I had to put any energy I had gained into finding a new job. Which I thankfully did - I'm now a policymaker at the (Dutch equivalent of) state level.

I am still thoroughly enjoying that. In a week or two, the big research project I spent the past year on is finally publicized. It's a 80-page report on transport justice (my thesis subject) but written from and for my government agency, so I'm expecting some real change and feathers to be ruffled by it. My next big project is to build a bikesharing system from the ground up - think Citibike, but then trying to get it to work in a more rural environment.

Last year was all about another project - getting married! I'm now the proud owner of a beautiful ring on my hand. We had a phenomenal day and went three weeks to lovely Spain to recuperate.

Another more personal development is that I'm practicing meditation regularly these days. I can't think of a time in my life when my mental health has been better than now.