December 31, 2025
Everything was trending more positive than it was in 2024 and it’s most likely because of a genuine mindset shift towards actually thinking more positively. I’m honestly looking forward to where life is going.
I’ve continued to maintain the postal code finder site I created back in 2024 by actually redesigning it and adding new features, and while it still hasn’t dethroned the sites that I believe aren’t serving the user’s interests as well as they could, I’m really happy with how it’s going.
It has moved from the backwaters of the Google search results to the first page and it is regularly sitting at the 4th or 5th position. In terms of impressions, it has about 8.5K over 28 days, but unfortunately that number completely shadows the actual number of clicks which is several orders of magnitudes smaller. I do want to understand what I am missing to be able to increase clicks, but right now it’s not a priority.
To keep the interest in writing software alive I’ve started another side project, which will be another utility-type site. By “utility-type” I mean that it’s singular focus is to provide immediate value in the fastest possible manner; it’s not meant as a destination to spend time at. While the pace of AI tools has made realizing such projects more feasible than ever, I’m still struggling to find the time to actually sit down and work towards the vision I have. For me, there’s is a desire to be involved in the process and mold it the way I see fit, not just hand it off to an agent and get it out the door.
2018 355 ███████████▍
2019 591 ███████████████████▏
2020 562 ██████████████████▏
2021 772 █████████████████████████
2022 706 ██████████████████████▊
2023 563 ██████████████████▏
2024 648 ████████████████████▉
2025 564 ██████████████████▎
Avg. 595.12 ███████████████████▎
Total 4761 █████████████████████████The biggest gem this year was Heavyweight, a podcast about peoples’ past, how it has affected them, and how they want to go about making things right. As someone leaning more towards the introverted side, I would not have thought this would be up my alley, but ever since I found out about it (can’t recall from where, unfortunately), I have binge-listened to every episode, casting aside every other podcast in my list.
While the description of the podcast may make it out to seem intensely serious, then it’s nothing but at times. If I had to guess, then out of all the podcasts I listen to, this one has genuinely made me laugh out loud several times (given that I listen to podcasts usually on the go, then this has likely been quite the sight) because of the host’s sense of humor and his repartee with guests.
If someone is curious, a stand-out episode for me was #64 Kevin.
Still keeping the dream alive by having a steady stream of books to read! You can get this same graph through curl or visiting this link.
2012 8 ████████▎
2013 6 ██████▎
2014 8 ████████
2015 14 ██████████████▌
2016 8 ████████▎
2017 6 ██████▎
2018 0 ▏
2019 24 █████████████████████████
2020 17 █████████████████▋
2021 21 █████████████████████▉
2022 17 █████████████████▋
2023 13 █████████████▌
2024 8 ████████▎
2025 9 █████████▍
Avg. 11.36 ███████████▊
Total 159 █████████████████████████While I live in a country that has had a land value tax for as long as I can remember, it has never crossed my mind that the list of countries that have implemented one isn’t at all long2 with the real implementation rates being even lower when considering countries as a whole.
I’ve been a regular reader of Astral Codex Ten3 for years and he regularly hosts an anonymous book review contest and back in 2021 another gem was unearthed by, at that point, some unknown gentleman: Progress and Poverty. That review goes over one Henry George’s seminal book and the following line from the review:
George’s arguments about land, labor, and capital present a fresh alternative to conventional ideas about “Capitalism” and “Socialism” (and whatever we mean by those on any given day)
Was just the right hook for me given how much I’m a fan of equality in all possible dimensions.
The person who penned that review would later go on to write “Land is a Big Deal”, which should be the definitive book to read if someone needs to be thoroughly convinced that a land value tax is in all likelihood the best tax imaginable.
While the book can get awfully wordy at times with a lot of technical terms, it’s still a fantastic read in my opinion.
I used to be the type of person who eschewed gradual steps towards modernity, such as the one heralded by the rise in popularity of Spotify. My primary reluctance was on the grounds that streaming would never be able to provide the audio quality that I had come used to; secondary then that they are most likely just gathering all the data and selling it off to the highest bidder[^5].
As time goes on in one’s life, it’s nonsensical to stay true to every principle one has, and not using Spotify was one that quickly gave way when I met the love of my life. I wanted a no nonsense way of sharing music with her and since she was already an avid user, then it just made sense. I can definitely say that being a subscriber to Spotify has been a net benefit to my life (more on that emphasis later).
When I saw that Anthony Fantano posted an interview with a clickbait title and in its description was mention of a new book about Spotify, then that immediately caught my attention as the list of criticisms of Spotify is long and I’ve drank enough of the Anthony Fantano Kool-Aid to want to know more about this company I’m regularly giving money to.
If you too are interested where else Spotify has gone wrong, on top of the lengthy Wikipedia article, then this book is right up your alley. It goes into topics like pay-to-play schemes, ghost artists, algorithmic curation, how sound has become homogenized, and just how large of a role one company has had in all of this. I’m quite frankly shocked at the amount of detail the author, Liz Pelly, managed to provide. This level of transparency about a secretive company’s inner-workings is rare and I am so glad she was able to go as deep as she did.
Quite literally this book has been on my to-read list since October 2019, and I both started and finished it in October 2025. The main reason I was compelled to pick this up was that the ever-growing AI bubble seemed to warrant a historical perspective.
Beyond the economic analysis, I was particularly struck by an extended passage on the nature of business meetings that had nothing to do with the crash itself. Galbraith dissects why meetings are held even when no business needs transacting: the need for companionship, the prestige of presiding, the illusion of productivity. Here’s the part from Chapter VII, part IV:
Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.
The fact that no business is transacted at a no-business meeting is normally not a serious cause of embarrassment to those attending. Numerous formulas have been devised to prevent discomfort. Thus scholars, who are great devotees of the no-business meeting, rely heavily on the exchange-of-ideas justification. To them the exchange of ideas is an absolute good. Any meeting at which ideas are exchanged is, therefore, useful. This justification is nearly ironclad. It is very hard to have a meeting of which it can be said that no ideas were exchanged. Salesmen and sales executives, who also are important practitioners of the no-business gathering, commonly have a different justification and one that has strong spiritual overtones. Out of the warmth of comradeship, the interplay of personality, the stimulation of alcohol, and the inspiration of oratory comes an impulsive rededication to the daily task. The meeting pays for itself in a fuller and better life and the sale of more goods in future weeks and months.
The no-business meetings of the great business executives depend for their illusion of importance on something quite different. Not the exchange of ideas or the spiritual rewards of comradeship, but a solemn sense of assembled power gives significance to this assemblage. Even though nothing of importance is said or done, men of importance cannot meet without the occasion seeming important. Even the commonplace observation of the head of a large corporation is still the statement of the head of a large corporation. What it lacks in content it gains in power from the assets back of it.
Because the book is quite short at around 200 pages, it’s easy for me to recommend as a light read for people to get an understanding of the mindset that was present around the boom of the 1920s and how much it seems to echo what we’re going through now.
Going into this I truly wanted to be proved wrong, to hear good arguments as to why the current progress of AI will doom us all, but having read the book from cover to cover, I remain skeptical of the timelines and the arc in general. My hope, and assumption, was that since Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have lived and breathed this topic for a far bigger portion of their lives than I have, they would make an extremely compelling case that would be difficult for me not to believe.
What I found instead was a book filled with metaphors and hypothetical scenarios that are supposed to be easily extended into the real world. To me, that doesn’t work if the entire chain of thought ends up being like the “How to Draw an Owl” meme; there are just too many steps assumed with no explanation of how they could happen. Take for example the following:
Humanity is integrating AI into its economy at every opportunity. Elon Musk says his robot company will build a few hundred million or a billion robots and train AIs to steer them around. Microsoft and Apple have declared their intention to integrate AI deeply into their devices.
If you dropped a datacenter containing an AI into the year 10,000 BC, maybe it’d have difficulty manipulating the world. But the present-day world is one where smart AIs would not have any trouble at all acting on the world.
The very next paragraphs are literally the following:
What happens then, once AIs have some power over the world—and once they’re smart enough to use it?
We don’t know exactly what happens in the near term. Things could get weird, as AIs that aren’t very smart yet proliferate through the economy. Pathways are hard to predict.
But we can predict the endpoint.
And that’s what the book continues to do: predict.
If the situation really is as dire as the authors presume it to be, then I would have expected far more concrete explanations of how the current state of affairs moves from the realm of theory into practice. It all assumes that AI somehow engulfs every system in the world and rules over us with us having absolutely no agency left.
I would recommend this book only to educate oneself on what the leading minds from the other side of the argument have to say. For more counter-arguments, I suggest reading Understanding AI’s Substack post ‘The case for AI doom isn’t very convincing’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Implementation ↩
Highly recommended Substack, by the way ↩