2026 Q2 update

lots of plot over the last three months! though unfortunately that means i didn’t read/watch/write as much as i’d prefer

things i enjoyed reading:

• two posts on china from the same blog: you are not the one on the brutal marriage markets caused by gender imbalances and an extremely online society; where is chinese cyberpunk? on why cyberpunk aesthetics so often reference japanese rather than chinese cities

  • Wang Wei sent her a sports car last Tuesday. It cost him 500 RMB, which is roughly one-seventh of his monthly rent. She said his username, “WangWei198769” and smiled at the camera. His heart melted. He took a screenshot... He is not confused about the nature of this transaction. He is very clear about what it is. He just can’t think of a better use for 500 RMB that produces that specific feeling

  • By any reasonable cyberpunk metric, we should be drowning in neon Mandarin by now. Our movies should be set in Neo-Beijing... So where the fuck is our Chinese dystopian future?... Why does every sci-fi movie still fetishize the same tired Tokyo aesthetic that peaked when Reagan was president?... Her (2013) actually filmed in Shanghai but director Spike Jonze mixed the footage with LA to create his “future Los Angeles”, using China’s actual futurism but hiding its origin

  • Blade Runner asked if androids dream of electric sheep. The real question is: do consumers dream of supply chain independence? The answer is no. We dream of faster delivery and lower prices.

• strait of hormuz: a citrini field trip. a financial analyst visits hormuz to check on the status of oil ships passing through the strait (back when the media was full of misinformation about whether the strait was open or closed and markets were extremely volatile). a very unexpected and well-written piece from an investment blog

  • If David Foster Wallace were alive today, he’d be reporting from the bar in a beachside town on the Omani coast– taking notes on a napkin about the particular quality of silence in a hundred-room hotel with three guests, watching tankers drift towards, but never quite reach, the Strait of Hormuz. That’s our inspiration here, if DFW was also concerned with finding alpha

  • Then the smuggling boats started running past — eight of them, maybe more, Iranian kids in their early twenties with big smiles, waving, throwing cigarettes across to us. I threw up a peace sign. And then one of them turned and pulled directly toward us at high speed from the direction of Iran... He held out his cigarette and I handed him my cigar, and we looked at each other across the gap between two boats in the middle of the most contested waterway on earth, and we nodded, and we smiled, and neither of us said a word

• how to live safely in a science fictional universe. this book uses time machines as a scaffold to explore the narrator’s relationship with his father. it discusses standard mechanics and dilemmas around time travel but the setup is interesting because the “time machine” operates via memory and regret, so it’s possible to interpret this book as not being sci-fi at all

  • Unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it

• you had me at hello world. an incredibly nostalgic read - the story features very specific descriptions of mit campus / cambridge / the startup world; i felt like i was 19 years old and discovering all these things for the first time again

• shorter reads i liked: i was scrolling and then i saw a pregnant strawberry, probably the funniest paper i’ve ever seen on arxiv. stables and volatiles, about how engineering teams often bifurcate into stables (organized, slower, prioritize maintaining team dynamics) and volatiles (build quickly, disruptive, prone to burnout) and how both types are necessary for long-term success but most orgs prioritize one over the other. yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about love, which discusses how substack is dominated by “yearnslop” writing that is ultimately meaningless. you have to poop in the eiffel tower, a beautiful video essay on the infrastructure and maintenance that enables visitors to poop at the top of the eiffel tower

things i enjoyed watching:

• cowboy bebop, which is now in my top three favorite animes of all time (alongside madoka magica and mob psycho). it masquerades as a silly space western featuring an upbeat jazz soundtrack, but twenty-one minutes into the first episode the sax and dialogue and animation melt together in a single sublime moment and you realize you are watching a masterpiece. it’s the rare piece of media where, after finishing it, i genuinely had no idea how i would’ve created it myself, where each individual episode feels like filler and yet somehow these really profound and tragic character arcs unravel over the course of the show. sort of like bojack but much more subtle and set in space

• the devil wears prada and the devil wears prada 2. the former probably features the single greatest actress performance i’ve ever seen? and the latter mostly coasts off nostalgia from the former, but is still a fun watch

  • i also enjoyed the singularity does not wear prada, a commentary on how the world has changed in the time between the first and second films: Now it’s 2026 and I am old and my dreams have been crushed and The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a movie for old people like me about how everything is dying. They didn’t know about death yet in 2006, they didn’t have the subprime mortgage crisis and the iPhone and Twitter, the technology wasn’t quite there. In 2006 you could still believe that the main plot of the human story involved humans making human choices. In 2026 the main character of reality is the machine god, who eats you through the screen and replaces you with more of itself

• project hail mary - a bit too long but gorgeous visuals and a great demonstration of scrappy home lab science that reminded me of my housemates. felt like a mashup of 3-body problem, interstellar, arrival, and several other stories. loved the sign of the times karaoke scene

noteworthy plot:

• various events made me realize i’d much rather experience perpetual heartbreak than a relationship i’m unsure about. also: visited nyc to see if i want to move (50% yes?), got an iphone, tried bjj

• wrote a supply chains post which is now my most popular post by an order of magnitude. i’m happy that the post went viral, but i also felt a bit sad because i consider it to be far from my best writing (in fact it would’ve been quite easy to generate a similar post with chatgpt deep research)? it was my first time directly experiencing disempowerment on the internet, watching three years of steady progress get washed away in a single week by the self-reinforcing loops of recommendation algorithms. this spurred a lot of reflection on what kind of writing i want to produce moving forward; currently i think the answer is much better fiction + more interactive media

• the past month felt like two months. first i received an intern and spent some time thinking about how to be a better mentor. then there was a bunch of travel to sort out (july: going to seoul for the icml mech interp and pluralistic alignment workshops, then london for c&c, let me know if you’re around and want to hang out! was very tempted to visit oslo afterwards but decided against it and unfortunately also missing a large school reunion) and a lot of negotiation with my boss as i decided to leave but they wanted to explore various part-time options. then i spent a week scheduling calls with every person i might potentially want to collaborate with during funemployment (stanford salt lab seems most likely right now), and another week working with a friend on a two-player dating sim which is showing at the tiat slop exhibit until late july. life has been strange recently but i’m enjoying it!