Sampled #2
My recommendations from the last week.
My past week’s reading seems to have centred around revisiting the past and imagining the future; maybe it’s just the tail end of the year doing its thing. Or maybe its a side-effect of getting to travel to places you deeply connect with.
One of the reasons I come back to Haruki Murakami’s novels is because of the way he blends worlds so effortlessly. His particular flavour of magical realism, where the past and present constantly interact, really nails the idea that cultural memory isn’t fixed. It’s dynamic and alive, shaping how we see the world today. Esquire’s profile of him this week was a good read, and it left me thinking over how much of our nostalgia for the past is about making sense of the now.
And if nostalgia helps us find our bearings, our societal visions of the future set the paths we choose, or avoid. Virginia Postrel’s The World of Tomorrow took me back to a time when the future felt exciting, full of possibility, like the 1939 New York World’s Fair. But as she points out, over the years, that optimism gave way to a more sceptical view; disillusionment with unchecked progress and concerns about the environment taking centre stage.
That same scepticism feels alive and well in the world of AI, today. Evgeny Morozov’s The AI We Deserve calls out how the corporate and military-driven trajectory of AI and how that may be limiting its potential. He challenges us to think about a future where AI isn’t just another tool for efficiency or control but something that sparks creativity, playfulness, and human empowerment. It’s a welcome nudge to think beyond the obvious.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry introduced me to the concept of a gift economy. The idea is simple but profound: what if we stopped seeing resources as commodities and recognised them as gifts instead. It’s about fostering a sense of abundance and reciprocity, which feels like exactly the kind of mindset we need more of. This idea popped into my head again during a trip to Bruges this week, where we stumbled across a light show. It was completely open and accessible to everyone, it got people outside, sharing moments with friends, family, and strangers. The trail took us through parts of the city I hadn’t seen before, reframing the place entirely. It felt like a live example of Kimmerer’s point: something that gives far more than it takes; a gift.
Speaking of futures, and back to the world of AI, the news cycle was relentless this week. Amazon dropped its Nova foundation models, only to be eclipsed by Meta’s updates to Llama 3.3, claiming lofty 405B performance with a 70B model. Google’s Gemini-Exp-1206 is also topping the LLM Arena leaderboard, and OpenAI is drip-feeding announcements in a “12 Days of Christmas” fashion, kicking off with a $200/month premium tier for faster access to their latest and greatest. On the software side, it was also interesting to see the Linux kernel continue its slow oxidation, with Rust creeping further in.
And to wrap up, I’m circling back to a piece that surfaced on HN again this week, thinking about software as a lens for the world. It felt complementary to the mathematical thinking I referenced in last week’s Sampled.