Picard engineering tip: Maintenance of existing systems is just as important as building new capabilities.

I tried to buy a scientific paper

Science could be the first victim of AI. But not in a good way.

https://youtu.be/SEwiOykoXXc?is=D6j79Opf8e93DfO3

Generational Talk is BS

At least from a talking point of view of millennials, GenZ, GenX etc. The differences these categories describe have nothing to do with the year they were born but with their age. The same issues you can read about describing given generation can be found in books and articles from 100 years ago.

People preferences change with age. You get older, get kids, get richer and you have different values and look on life when you are 40 and when you are 15. That is just life.

Treat people as individuals, not as a category.

The Alchemy of Power

Religion always gets used for power purposes.

“European colonialism didn’t invent religious capture, but it industrialized it.”

https://tantaman.substack.com/p/the-alchemy-of-power

The Battlefield of Attention

You are what you consume.

“you become what you worship. Give your attention and devotion to something blind, and you go blind. Trust in something deaf, and you lose the capacity to hear. Serve something that cannot feel, and you become numb.”

https://tantaman.substack.com/p/the-battlefield-of-attention

Secularized Worship

Religion in another form is still doing the damage.

“A system built on terror produced terrified people who perpetuated terror. A system built on lies produced people who could no longer distinguish truth. A system built on the surveillance of inner life produced people who surveilled themselves.”

https://tantaman.substack.com/p/the-shape-of-the-container

Economy vs. Ecology

Economy and Ecology come from the same language concept. Both come from oikos, which means “house”.

Economy is joined with nemein, which means “to manage”. Ecology is joined with logia, which means “study of”.

Nowadays we focus a lot on economy, the management of our “house” – it being a household, a country or a planet. But how can you manage your house if you do not study it properly?

In the long term you cannot really have successful economy if you do not understand the ecology.

Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

AI won’t save us.

“As companies grow, they all end up with more and more layers of collaboration, review, and management. Why? Because otherwise mistakes get made, and mistakes are increasingly expensive at scale. The average value added by a new feature eventually becomes lower than the average value lost through the new bugs it causes. So, lacking a way to make features produce more value (wouldn’t that be nice!), we try to at least reduce the damage.”

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316

The New Lords

It is good to define what we are talking about.

“The conservative said: society is not a machine to be redesigned but an organism that has evolved. Its customs, hierarchies, and prejudices—yes, even its prejudices—encode wisdom we cannot fully articulate. Tear them down and you do not get utopia; you get the guillotine, then the Terror, then Napoleon.”

https://tantaman.com/2026-01-12-the-new-lords

Debugging the Confusion: Liberalism vs Leftism

What’s the difference?

“And it failed. The proletariat did not revolt. The workers bought cars and televisions and became, in their modest way, bourgeois. The prediction did not come true. History did not end as promised.”

https://tantaman.substack.com/p/debugging-the-confusion-liberalism