Weird how worried Wall Street is about DeepSeek, weren’t they just saying AI innovation is good even if it harms some people in the short term

now that DeepSeek has completed AI, we hope that Silicon Valley will turn its attention to the next best thing: investing in rural history museums

On the Grand Theft Auto theory of careers, inspired by my own recent history: open.substack.com/pub/askpang/...

Posting this for absolutely no reason whatsoever harpers.org/archive/1941...

Back to work

“I hate writing; I love having written” is a real thing (even if Dorthy Parker never actually said it).

The thing about Vivek's "white Americans are being pushed towards mediocrity by the culture" argument is its also the thesis of Hillbilly Elegy

End-of-year articles about work and rest have me thinking about how we now think about “productivity” all wrong, and what we can do about it: askpang.substack.com/p/my-hope-fo...

This has to be The Onion

I didn’t think I’d find an essay about telemarketing quite so entertaining, but life is full of surprises. “Everyone said that telemarketing was the worst job in town, and for once, everyone was right…” slate.com/life/2024/12...

Maybe the return to office folks have a point

“If someone makes $50 million on a speculative asset, then some other set of people must have lost that $50 million. They just don’t know it yet:” open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

This tracks with what I’ve seen when working with 4-day week companies: “improved performance on a 4-day working week arises through two psychological mechanisms of recovery and motivation: because better rested, better motivated brains, create better work:“ www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Apparently the lesson of “Don’t Build the Torment Nexus” continue to be misunderstood:

Can confirm

The only appropriate response is Nicolas Murray Butler’s when asked if he’d read Thornstein Veblen’s last book: “By God, I hope so.”

My conversation with Ian Bogost about the value of popped up on @theatlantic.com today: www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/arc...

Furry gargoyle

You think you’re working on your syllabus? You’re working for ME. Time for scritches, human!

If you don’t think a black-and-white concert film consisting of one person and a piano could be completely absorbing, you haven’t seen Opus, Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final performance: youtu.be/OyhTmH92Ljc?...

The Golden Police Department just released a report on its 4-day week trial. It was a success: response time down, code enforcement up, resignations down by 50%: ehq-production-us-california.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/cfbe4617ccc6...

It’s never too soon to start thinking about how to spend the weekend well! www.ted.com/talks/alex_s...

A new video on work and rest (recorded last year, but TED created a lot of good stuff so it takes a while to get published)!

Dude just biked by wearing noise canceling headphones, holding his iphone in one hand, dictating an email. The Apple goggles are going to be an asteroid-level threat for the distracted.

“you can’t be expected to contextualize your own life as a child.”

This is the perfect local news story, we can all give up now.

The brilliant Yael Schonbrun advises on “How to make tough choices in relationships:”

Power is out here in my little corner of Silicon Valley, so working by LED camp light and getting by on two bars of cell service, like a 12th century Norman scribe.

This is an early signal that many creatives won’t necessarily be replaced by AI, but their industries well be drowned by AI sludge that looks just similar enough to familiar work, and costs 0.001% to produce and sell.

What I don’t get about worldcoin is the design decision to put their iris scanning tech in these orbs. Did they never read any science fiction or fantasy? It teaches us that whether it’s metal, or crystal, or has an eye made of fire starting back at you, NEVER STARE INTO THE MYSTERIOUS ORB.

An interesting study on happiness and free time: the more meaningful or purposeful our free time is, the happier it makes us. (Findings I plan to share with the 4-day week companies I work with.)

This is why we can’t have nice things. “Thanks to wellness, QAnon is the conspiracy that can draw in the mum who shops at Holland & Barrett and her Andrew Tate-watching teenage son.”

This has always been a key point about the online right. What they really get off on isn't "trolling" or "debating," it's cruelty.

“As I came to recognise the methods of omission, they fascinated me. When women can’t be left out, they are doubted, trivialised, or reduced to footnotes…. But the most insidious way the actions of women are omitted is by using the passive voice.” Read this essay. It’s 🔥🔥🔥.

Bill McKibben on the 4-day week and degrowth in The New Yorker: "[I]t would be wise to use that enormous process… to nudge our societies toward greater equality and greater conviviality. An E.V. is a good way to cut carbon emissions, but so, it turns out, is a four-day workweek.”

“Major 4-day workweek study suggests that when we work 5 days we spend one doing basically nothing: Essentially, those of us on a five-day week are filling up our days with time-wasting activities.”

As many writers on fascism have noted, open displays of hypocrisy and contradiction drive to undermine trust in everything, while showing that “we” can get away with anything.

I run programs for 4 Day Week Global. My goal is to help people and companies create a million news years of free time.

4 Day Week Global is holding another information session about the #4dayweek movement and our next English-language group trial (launching September 2023) on Monday July 24th at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern time. Register here for free:

I talk about the 4-day week with Bloomberg reporter Irina Anghel:

Okay let’s see what this can do.