Roundup #26: Having kids, energy transition, Clubhouse, and my first open source contribution
Turns out the pessimists were wrong about kids, personal carbon footprints don’t matter, Clubhouse sucked, and I just shipped my first open-source project
Having kids has been far easier and more fun than I expected
For those reading who have kids, I don’t know what you expected, but like the author of this post, I also was mainly told about losing the freedom to do what you want, not being able to travel as much, sleep deprivation, etcetera. When my son was born a friend asked in a group chat if I “already wanted to go back to my previous life”. In the 4 years since then, and with our second now around 20 months, we’ve often wondered why we are finding life as parents so fun and easy-going. Are we just lucky that our kids are rarely sick (so far)? Is it because we live in Singapore so we don’t have to do any household work? Is it a mindset thing? Probably all of the above. But even now, some parents with older kids keep using the “just you wait” line on us. “Just you wait until they hit puberty”. So the post linked above really resonated with me. If you have kids and enjoy it, read it. If you don’t have kids yet and aren’t sure whether you should, also read it!
A fascinating post about the AI Scene in China
America’s Greatest Misunderstanding: Underestimating China’s Below-the-Iceberg Deep Infrastructure and Equating Innovation with Theft
China’s Misconceptions About America: Hubris, Overplaying Silicon Valley Setbacks, and Underestimating Valley Talent Depth
And much more!
For the climate, little things don’t add up
As a Dutch millennial I was raised with the slogan: “A better environment starts with you”. It was part of a government campaign focusing on educating the public on things like turning down the heater, recycling, separating trash. As we got deeper and deeper into grass roots climate change prevention stuff, it turned out none of these things really matter. It started to hit me when I learned what the high-level breakdown is of CO2 emissions.
It became painfully obvious that there was nothing I could personally change in my own lifestyle do have any effect on this. That’s what prompted me to create, after watching Cowspiracy, a little webapp called carbonfoodprint that let people calculate the carbon footprint from their diet. The upshot of the math is that if you just cut back on beef and lamb, you can get 80% of the diet footprint reduction you would get from going full vegan. That seemed like a much more palatable thing to do for many people than the hardcore demand to go vegan for the climate. My hope in creating the app was that in addition to making that change myself, I could also influence thousands of other people to do it and so multiply the impact to a point where it actually mattered. But, in retrospect even if that app would have reached millions of people it would still have been a drop in the bucket. If you wanted to do one thing for the coming year to impact climate change, what should it be? This great post makes the point with the following example: Three people try their best to impact climate change:
Kate joins a 500-person committee that succeeds in keeping a nuclear powerplant open for 10 extra years
Bob goes vegan for one year
Freddy quits his extreme ChatGPT addiction (2,000 prompts/day)
Results: Even though the nuclear power plant has to be divided by 500 people, Kate’s impact equals 175,000 Bobs or 350,000 Freddys.
Although the math checks out and, I think, makes a valid point, there is a problem with actionability. Did Kate have to work full-time on the committee? That is quite a different commitment to going vegan. But more importantly, currently in Singapore there simply exists no committee I can join to keep a nuclear powerplant open. But the insight from the article that got me pondering my career choices (again) is that if you wanted to help fight climate change, try to figure out how you can help push energy generation toward renewables. Everything else is dwarfed by comparison. Even the fact that producing cement is 5% of total global emissions is only true because the process consumes ungodly amounts of electricity. The solution to climate change is: Massively expand clean energy production → electrify everything as much as possible. See also my earlier post on this.
The electrotech age: pivoting mindsets from degrowth to science fiction utopia
People used to say in the 00s that a Nokia had way more computing power than the Apollo 11 guidance computer, which is true. But I thought I’d make a comparison that hits closer to home for my mostly millennial audience:
A fancy PC from the mid-90s with a Pentium 100 cost $3,800-4,500 (adjusted for inflation), and an iPhone 15 Pro now has roughly 50,000+ times the processing power and 500-1,000 times the memory for a cost of $999. And it fits IN YOUR POCKET!
Progress in electronic technology has been spectacular. Solar panels are essentially also computer chips. Think about the implications. That’s why solar has gotten so damn cheap. And that’s also why conservatives don’t believe that this is the case. They fail to understand that solar panels have followed a computer like improvement curve. With solar, energy generation shifts from us needing to dig up and burn a commodity, to it being electronic technology. Commodities don’t come with learning effects, and using them doesn’t get cheaper over time. But electronics do.
I’ve been a years long proponent now of the idea of energy abundance unlocked by creating massive amounts of clean energy (and maybe still some new nuclear). If electricity were clean and abundant, we could do some truly awesome stuff, like creating fuel for airplanes out of thin air. CO2 + 2 H2O + Electricity → CH4 + 2 O2. That methane (CH4), goes boom if you light it on fire1. Many people have been doing their best to spread the word about how super cool and awesome solar power is, to replace the 00s hemp-wearing eco-warrior2 degrowth narratives that alienated so many people. We really have to get the right wingers back around to solar, for example by making it clear that they can have more cool shit that makes masculine sounds if we had lots of cheap power.
This way of looking at the world, where clean electricity is cool and pro-growth is presented by the authors of this Slide Deck from Ember Futures as a third narrative, where currently there are only two, which (inconveniently) are coded right- and left wing politically. Basically, on the one hand we have the left who think energy and capitalism are evil and oppressive. On the other hand we have the right who are scared that renewable energy will make them turn gay and vegan.
There is so much great stuff in the full deck, but I’ll share a few more nuggets. Look at this one, for example. The sun supplies more energy every 5 days than all fossil fuel reserves combined.
I also like this framing of fossil fuels as basically digging up and burning old sunshine, in other words, all energy is solar energy anyway. So if solar energy is gay, then diesel is just as gay. The full deck is worth a read for sure!
An extremely cynical critic of AI and the tech ecosystem in general with a penchant for the word “dogshit”
I came across this interview with Ed Zitron that had me laugh and snicker a couple of times. I read a bunch of his other posts and he is too negative and angry for my taste, but to read just a bit of it could be a good antidote against the narratives dominating the media.
I especially enjoyed this part about Clubhouse:
It was really back in 2020, because there was this company called Clubhouse that came out. It was an audio-only social network, and it was dogshit. It was a terrible product. It sucked. It was boring. It was a live-streamed podcast with the least interesting motherfuckers of all time going like, “What if a woman were...” “Well, you know, what if we did something?” And like a bunch of people: “Wow, damn, this is so cool!”
But the media fell over themselves around Clubhouse. They were like, “This is the next thing! This is the new big social network! Everyone’s gonna buy!” And it became really obvious that what was actually happening was that the people who invested in Clubhouse were trying to sell Clubhouse so that they could exit. They had a classic Snapchat-style thing where they had an offer on the table, or they were close to having one to sell to someone else — I think it was Twitter — and they just chose not to. And the media just fell behind it. It was completely insane. Even though when you use the product — and I get the sense you used it — it was bad.
That is all so true.
I have created my first open-source contribution as a developer
When I start a hobby, I always think about what would be some cool hills to climb. One thing I figured would be cool to do as a software builder was to create something free that people can use. So I created a template for a directory website.
My plan is to use this template myself to launch 3-4 directories that are upstream of software in some of the spaces I’m interested in. Alternative AI interfaces like Magicdoor.ai, Customer Support tools, AI Native SaaS. But I also wanted to get over a blank-page fear with coding projects, and take another crack at getting vibe coded stuff to actually look great and be structured very cleanly. AI tends to make a bit of a mess on both counts.
Was a guest in an online sharing session about how to use AI
My friend Nav organizes sessions from time time that are open discussions / extended Q&As about how people work. I was very happy to join one and share how I built Magicdoor.ai, my current coding and AI setup, and compare notes on context engineering. During the session, Nav shared an interesting workflow for Cursor, where different ‘Rules’ files act as different ‘Personas’ to tackle various stages of the development process. These rules files are structured exactly the way you would structure a prompt for a CustomGPT (Assistant in Magicdoor). But in Cursor, you can just @[filename] mention these ‘prompts’ and they’ll kick into action.
So, suddenly a feature idea came up for Magicdoor.ai to be able to mention an assistant in-line within a message. I kicked off a Claude Code session during the call, and an hour later, the feature was live. I wrote only 2 lines of code myself to sort out a state management issue that AI was overcomplicating.
Pretty stoked with this feature, and with the way it was originated!
We probably need to do that, because Kerosene contains more energy per KG than batteries. Because of that, it seems unlikely that airplanes will fly electrically for long distances any time soon. Also, rockets and probably ships, generators and other stuff with long replacement cycles that will continue burning fuel for at least the next 50 years.
AI translation of the awesome Dutch term “Geitenwollen Sokken” (goal wool socks).