Kuai Kuai culture: Translating to “behave behave”, Taiwanese engineers will put green and unexpired Kuai Kuai snacks near their equipment in hopes that it will behave better.
For the Eagles, the victory snatched from the jaws of certain defeat served as a morale boost, leading that season to a playoff berth and, two seasons later, the franchise’s first Super Bowl appearance. To Giants fans, it was the nadir of a long era of poor results, but the aftermath of this would lead to major changes that proved beneficial for the franchise in the long run. For the sport in general, the main legacy of the game was its contribution to the adoption and acceptance of the quarterback kneel as the standard method for winning teams in possession of the ball to end games under the appropriate set of circumstances.
a group of Chilean economists who rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Most were educated at the University of Chicago Department of Economics under influential figures like Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, and Larry Sjaastad, or at its academic partner, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. After returning to Latin America, they assumed key roles as economic advisors in several South American governments, most notably the military dictatorship of Chile (1973–1990), where many attained the highest economic offices.[1] Their free-market policies later influenced conservative governments abroad, including those of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.
Brightline is Actually Pretty Dangerous: “Brightline is about 20x more deadly per passenger-mile (counting people inside and outside the vehicle) than driving”.
A decade ago I probably cared more about optimization, maximization, efficiency and outcomes. Carbon bikes, fast times, race results. Now as a middle-aged athlete and human, I find myself increasingly more interested in the means than the end. That might sound like a cop-out in response to my waning peak physical abilities. But I think such an attitude is also just the result of a natural maturation as one goes through life.
American lawyer who has served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Oregon since 2019. She has concurrently served as a judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court since 2024.
So to conclude: censorship in public spaces bad, even if the public spaces are non-governmental; censorship in genuinely private spaces (especially spaces that are not “defaults” for a broader community) can be okay; ostracizing projects with the goal and effect of denying access to them, bad; ostracizing projects with the goal and effect of denying them scarce legitimacy can be okay.
postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth.
an American law professor at the Regent University School of Law, former criminal defense attorney, and Fifth Amendment expert. Duane has received considerable online attention for his lecture “Don’t Talk to the Police”, in which he advises citizens to avoid incriminating themselves by speaking to law enforcement officers.
Work culture creep: The environment part seems huge to me. This motivated me to change my work outfit to something much more professional to allow me to shift to my “home mindset” by changing clothes when I get home. Report to be published early 2026.
Make product worse, get money: A similar argument seems to get made by believers of planned obsolescence, where companies make products last just long enough for the consumer to say “okay, that lasted a long time better go get a new one”. The risk of it getting out that they deliberately planned the lifespan and the free market encouraging cheaper prices and/or longer lifespans seems to go against that here. Combine this with just how big the market is and it’s probably in the company’s best interest to attract new consumers than force existing ones to pay for a new product.
Rich Friend, Poor Friend: “So this dynamic emerges where my rich friends never ask each other for help, pay for services using money, and never do anything unpleasant for each other, whereas my poorer friends are always doing stuff for each other out of necessity and becoming closer knit in the process.”
Splash (otter): Search-and-rescue otter trained for police usage. Apparently otters can “detect scents underwater by blowing bubbles and quickly re-inhaling them; the inhaled bubbles absorb odors from the surrounding water.”
The Mainstreaming of Loserdom: Yeah, sorry, not having hobbies isn’t cool. Go outside, use your brain, or do something with your hands.
Oliver (chimpanzee): “chimpanzee once promoted as a missing link or “humanzee” due to his somewhat human-like appearance and a tendency to walk upright.” See also humanzees.
Damian Williams (lawyer): “served as the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2021 to 2024. He has been involved in the prosecution of numerous high-profile individuals, including Ghislaine Maxwell, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sean Combs, Mayor Eric Adams, and U.S. Senator Bob Menendez.”
Wesley has described himself as “conservative in nature, pragmatic at the same time, with a fair appreciation of judicial restraint,” adding that “I ... have always restricted myself to what I understand to be the plain language of the statute. ... As long as the language is plain, we should restrict ourselves.”[6] He aims to write opinions that satisfy what he calls the “Livonia Post Office test”—that is, they are understandable to his neighbors back home.
The “tasting day”: why buying 5 babkas at once is an underrated source of meaning: I’ve done similar but with walking to each place—I call it a food crawl. Choose your food, find X restaurants within walking distance of each other, and get walking (and eating). I find the walking between leads to great convos, fun discoveries, better digestion (see verdauungsspaziergang), and less guilt about all the delicious food you just ate.
project ideas i hope someone steals from me: The typesetting ones are awesome, but (probably) require sooooo much work. Now I wonder how a SOTA LLM would do at typesetting something in LaTeX or similar. A FancyBookGPT that outputs an entire book given text would be pretty neat.
Various ICBM speeds animated: The whole “hitting a bullet with a bullet” explanation didn’t really click for me until I saw this—missiles move insanely fast. Couple that with multiple warheads per missile (see multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV)), decoy missiles, etc. and you have a really difficult problem to solve.
ICBM address: “hacker slang for one’s longitude and latitude (preferably to seconds-of-arc accuracy) when placed in a signature or another publicly available file.”
Sanjay Shah: “a British trader who was sentenced by a Danish court in 2024 to 12 years in prison for tax fraud, the heaviest penalty ever handed out in Denmark for a fraud case.”
Two easy digital intentionality practices: The first is go for a walk without your phone (I think this can be more generalized into “do something without your phone”) and the second is to switch phones with the person you’re with. I found the first surprisingly hard not because of willpower, but sheer habit. My phone lives on my person and it feels weird to not have it with me when leaving the apartment.
Always mask at airports: Especially when in lines and during taxiing. The “if you don’t do it all the time it’s worthless” argument continues to fall flat: total viral load matters! Any reduction in the amount of contact, whether by space or mask, is better than no reduction, hence masking being worth it.
Curtis Priem: Nvidia cofounder. “In November 2023, Forbes estimated Priem’s net worth to be approximately $30 million; if he had retained his shares in Nvidia, Forbes estimated that Priem would have been worth $70 billion.”
Ilya Sutskever deposition: Some extra details about the OpenAI coup and what led up to it. I find the constant objections and bickering humorous. It’s also interesting that Ilya doesn’t know who’s paying for his legal counsel. Maybe it’s a future superintelligence ensuring he doesn’t go broke on his path to creating said superintelligence.
A theory of performative engagement: or, how power actually works on Twitter and Substack: I constantly feel like this is the case with LinkedIn, Substack, and Twitter replies, especially those starting with platitudes like “X, thanks for posting this. Here are my very generic thoughts on it to increase the number of views my account gets in hope that someone rich and powerful sees”.
The Kill Pause: Kirkpatrick discusses the tragic death of Balin Miller, a climber who died after rappelling off the end of his rope. It’s amazing what fatigue, competence, and impatience can cause some people to do.
Why not in the order that you got value from them? This would have made it easier for me to navigate the links, though I can imagine this would be a bit more annoying on your end.
I realized soon after posting that it probably wasn't in the best order, so thank you for confirming that! I chose chronological order out of laziness because that's the order in which I add them to my repository.
My December 2025 Links post will be ordered by most to least interesting.
Here’s everything I read in November 2025 in chronological order.
Miracle at the Meadowlands:
Chicago Boys:
Snow Shovels & Singlespeeds:
Karin Immergut:
On Free Speech:
Bullshit Jobs:
James Duane:
Richard C. Wesley: