The Flaws of Spreadsheet Driven Reasoning
Somewhere around 2019 (!) I read this article: “How the Invention of Spreadsheet Software Unleashed Wall Street on the World” by Janet Burns. Judging by the date I recorded this article in my wiki, I think I must have encountered this during my funemployment after being laid off from WeWork. I had accepted my garden leave from them, had already accepted a job at Bloomberg and was enjoying some Neumann-financed time off.
Regardless, I’d never forgotten some brilliant lines and quotes from it and I re-read the article today.
I was staggered by how well it all worked if you swapped “spreadsheet” for “AI.”
The Revenge of the Text Interface and the Standard Interface
If you had told me five years ago that the most popular interface for the most powerful applications on earth would be the command line, I would have sighed and said, “I wish.” But that’s exactly what’s happened.
Applications like Claude Code:
Claude Code session inside of tmux
and OpenAI’s Codex
Second-mover Codex CLI looks pretty similar to Claude Code
have made the terminal-only experience feel universal, elegant, and desirable to a generation that grew up on iPhones and fat Electron apps. What’s going on here? Above that, what’s going on with the standard user interface with File / Edit / … Help?
MA(t)GA: Make American (Trains) Great Again
As I’ve mentioned before, in high school I encountered the industrial erotica of Ayn Rand and thought long and hard about whether or not it was bunkum1 . While her philosophy is incomprehensible to me now, her aesthetic lasts and can be loved quite separately from her philosophy (see: BioShock). Her aesthetic was the apotheosis of Art Deco or 1940s Manhattan. And, to be fair, it was pretty great.
- Art Deco Skyscrapers (Hell yeah)
- Latent fetishization of a semi-religious “elect,” authoritarian class (oh…no, nonono)
- Horny, small-chested, wealthy women in fabulous gowns2 (Hell yeah)
- Horny, broad-chested, poor men, sweating and making an industrial paradise (Hell yeah)
- Romance between the two3 (Hell yeah)
- TRAINS! (Hell yeah)
Yes, TRAINS!.
Atlas Shrugged imagined a world where trains were the load-bearing4 strut to the economy. The lady that ran the trains was the nation’s most iconic industrialist; the magnate that could make a better rail was the only peer to her (Yes! They boink!). They show altruistic liberals what’s what.
So here’s my question: Why aren’t the partisans of MAGA (who don’t give a shit about the environment, or, like Rand, about sexual consent) advocating for trains to be expanded all across this land?
Flying is a semi-bestial experience these days. Why not move in grand vitesse
luxury for a few more hours with satellite telcom uplink and get where you’re
going with nary a wrinkle in your Brooks Brothers? And you mean to tell me
you’re going to let the shithole countries distinguished trading partners
lay more rail than us, or France and Japan run faster trains than ours?
If the MAGA paradise age was 1955, it should be embarrassing that there were more routes back then than there are now. Head on over to your local rally and let’s get us some trains!