In May 2022, some­one posted to Hacker News Bartosz

Ciechanowski’s

blog post

ex­plain­ing how me­chan­i­cal watch move­ments work. Since then, his blog has been my ab­solute fa­vorite cor­ner of the Internet. His posts are not just well writ­ten and easy to fol­low, the ac­com­pa­ny­ing in­ter­ac­tive il­lus­tra­tions are mag­nif­i­cent.

The first il­lus­tra­tion in his blog post about me­chan­i­cal watch move­ments al­lows you to “explode” a tick­ing me­chan­i­cal move­ment and ro­tate it to in­spect its every com­po­nent from any an­gle. I owe my foray into the hobby of watch­mak­ing to Bartosz, but that’s not what this blog post is about. Instead, I want to scratch an itch I’ve had for years now: How cool would it be to hold an ex­ploded view of a real me­chan­i­cal watch in your hand?

Screenshot of the ex­ploded view ren­der from Bartosz

Ciechanowski’s

blog post.

I fig­ured that surely, some­one has had this idea and built it be­fore. On eBay you’ll find cubes of resin em­bed­ding var­i­ous ran­dom com­po­nents from me­chan­i­cal watches, but they are typ­i­cally sold as “steampunk art” and bear lit­tle re­sem­blance to the proper as­sem­bly of a me­chan­i­cal watch move­ment. Sometimes, you’ll find resin cast­ings show­ing every com­po­nent of a move­ment spread out in a plane like a buf­fet–-very cool, but not what I’m look­ing for. Despite my best ef­forts, I haven’t found any­one who makes what I’m af­ter, and I have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion as to why that is.

Building an ex­ploded view of a me­chan­i­cal watch move­ment is un­doubt­edly very fid­dly work and re­quires work­ing knowl­edge about how a me­chan­i­cal watch is as­sem­bled. People with that skillset are called watch­mak­ers. Maker, not “destroyer for the sake of art”. I guess it falls to me, then, to give this pro­ject an hon­est shot.

…how do you build such a model?

Here comes my fa­vorite part: jump­ing head-first into a pro­ject re­quir­ing a set of skills I don’t even know ex­ist, let alone pos­sess, fol­low­ing a process that de­vel­ops as the pro­ject evolves. So how would one go about build­ing a real-life ex­ploded view of a me­chan­i­cal watch move­ment?

The first thing to con­sider is what type of me­chan­i­cal watch move­ment to “explode”. Although he does­n’t ex­plic­itly say, I think Bartosz Ciechanowski’s blog post is based on the ETA cal­iber

2824-2 me­chan­i­cal watch move­ment (or one of its many clones, such as the Chinese PT5000). This is a very ro­bust and pop­u­lar au­to­matic (self-winding) me­chan­i­cal wrist­watch move­ment found in many watches. It’s con­sid­ered one of the all-time “workhorse” move­ments of the in­dus­try. I highly en­cour­age the cu­ri­ous reader to check out this YouTube video

of a very skilled and equally witty watch­maker ser­vic­ing a Hamilton watch fea­tur­ing this ex­act move­ment. The video will also re­veal how many ab­solutely minis­cule com­po­nents make up the ETA-2824, mak­ing it less than ideal for my ini­tial pro­to­typ­ing. A larger and sim­pler move­ment would be much bet­ter.

Luckily, in the late 1800′s to early 1900′s, many peo­ple car­ried a pock­et­watch about their per­son. However, as smaller wrist­watches gained pop­u­lar­ity among men, be­gin­ning around the first world war with trench watches, pocket watches lost their value as time­pieces. Many were melted down to re­claim the gold used to case the move­ment. Today, you can find gor­geous, hand-en­graved move­ments from the turn of the 20th cen­tury on eBay

for next to noth­ing.

Pocketwatches are the sim­plest me­chan­i­cal watch move­ments out there: they typ­i­cally don’t have any date com­pli­ca­tions, aren’t self-wind­ing, and usu­ally don’t even have a cen­tral sec­onds hand–-that’s a rel­a­tively mod­ern fea­ture. There’s a rea­son bud­ding watch­mak­ers start out prac­tic­ing on pock­et­watch move­ments.

Now for the hard part: How do you sus­pend 50-100 tiny com­po­nents to form an ex­ploded view of the as­sem­bly?

A beau­ti­ful early 1900′s pock­et­watch move­ment from eBay. $20 for a piece of horo­log­i­cal art.

The model I’m plan­ning to build must stand up to be­ing han­dled, which means it must be solid. In turn, that prob­a­bly means that I need to cast my com­po­nents in clear epoxy resin. My first idea was to build the ex­ploded model up, layer by layer, let­ting the resin cure be­tween each layer. To save time, I ex­per­i­mented with clear resin that cures when ex­posed to UV light. There are sev­eral rea­sons why this did not work:

The resin I pur­chased ended up with a heavy yel­low tint af­ter cur­ing.

My puny UV flash­light took for­ever to cure a pour even 1 mm deep.

The seams be­tween lay­ers are very vis­i­ble.

The first two prob­lems can prob­a­bly be solved by throw­ing money at the prob­lem, but the last is­sue seems to be a prob­lem with vary­ing in­dices of re­frac­tion through­out my cast­ing. The resin art com­mu­nity is well-aware of this prob­lem, and the sug­gested so­lu­tion is to pour the next layer of resin be­fore the pre­vi­ous layer has fully cured. This sup­pos­edly helps the two lay­ers fuse, and should make the tran­si­tion be­tween lay­ers much less pro­nounced. Unfortunately, UV resin seems to cure from the out­side in, mean­ing I needed to use “regular” two-part epoxy in­stead.

To achieve the ef­fect I want, I need around 20 lay­ers for a reg­u­lar pocket watch move­ment. If I were to cast each layer in a trans­par­ent con­tainer, adding com­po­nents and epoxy as the pre­vi­ous layer was half-cured, I would be do­ing noth­ing else for a solid week. Instead, I fig­ured my best bet was to cast all 20-or-so lay­ers at once, and stack them to­gether once the epoxy was semi-cured. So, my next pro­ject was to or­der some cast­ing sil­i­cone and cast my­self a mold suited to cast­ing thin disks of clear epoxy. A bak­ing tray stud­ded with poker chips formed the ideal mold for cast­ing the sil­i­cone.

My resin disks solved prob­lems 1 and 2 above, but prob­lem 3 is still un­solved. In ad­di­tion, this was a very messy and chal­leng­ing way to cast resin: the half-cured disks are floppy, resin runs every­where and bub­bles get stuck be­tween the lay­ers. I bought a small vac­uum cham­ber to com­bat the bub­ble is­sue, but es­cap­ing gas weaked havoc on the disks of resin. I learned enough about resin cast­ings to fi­nally re­al­ize that lay­ered cast­ing is not the way to go.

1st at­tempt: em­bed­ding some nails in lay­ers of UV resin.

2nd at­tempt: Embedding more nails in disks of clear resin in a sil­i­cone mold…

It took a while to ac­cept that the only hope I had was to cast the en­tire model at once. This is dif­fi­cult be­cause I need to some­how sus­pend each tiny com­po­nent in a way that is ro­bust enough for me to pour resin all over it and then pull out any air bub­bles.

Scarred and burnt by resin’s in­dex of re­frac­tion, I went look­ing for very thin rods of plas­tic or acrylic that I could cut to length and glue my com­po­nents to. Fishing line fits the bill. Specifically, monofil­a­ment ny­lon leader used in fly fish­ing. It comes in many thick­nesses, has an in­dex of re­frac­tion very sim­i­lar to epoxy resin, and is cheap. The only ma­jor chal­lenge with us­ing fish­ing line is that it “remembers” its spooled shape, so every seg­ment I cut off has a slight bend to it. I was able to rem­edy this some­what by string­ing it re­peat­edly across the grill pan in my oven and bak­ing it at 150°C (300°F) for an hour or so. When done, the mid­dle seg­ments are rea­son­ably straight and sig­nif­i­cantly stiffer than what I started with.

The as­sem­bly process ac­tu­ally re­sem­bles “proper” watch­mak­ing a lot. Of course, tweezer con­trol and steady hands are im­por­tant. But ap­ply­ing tiny drops of CA glue to com­po­nents with a pin­head is a lot like ap­ply­ing oil to bear­ing sur­faces and jew­els. I just find it amus­ing to do it with glue in­stead of oil–-CA glue be­ing the com­plete

op­po­site of a lu­bri­cant.

Armed with a pair of help­ing hands and a set of self-clos­ing tweez­ers, I found the process of build­ing up the ex­ploded model of a scrap watch move­ment to be very sat­is­fy­ing.

Monofilament fish­ing line main­tains the dis­tance be­twen com­po­nents. A jig holds every­thing still while the CA glue hard­ens.

At this point I’ve tried a num­ber of dif­fer­ent epoxy resins claim­ing to cure crys­tal clear. As far as I can tell, they all turn out ap­pre­cia­bly clear. Their main dif­fer­ences are vis­cos­ity, cure time and how much air they trap when mix­ing. Some resins claim to ex­pel bub­bles when cur­ing. They man­age this to some ex­tent, but to get com­pletely clear cast­ings you ei­ther need a vac­uum cham­ber to pull out all the air from your cast, or a pres­sure cham­ber to com­pletely squash any pock­ets of air. I went for a vac­uum pump be­cause it’s a fun thing to have around (boiling wa­ter at room tem­per­a­ture does­n’t get old). Another ben­e­fit of the vac­uum pump is that you don’t need to leave your cast in the cham­ber for the en­tire cure time. My cast­ings have a lot of voids that love to trap air, and the vac­uum cham­ber does a good job of pulling out the trapped air.

My cast­ing method goes like this: Mix enough of part A and B of your resin to fill the mold plus 10–15 %. Mix thor­oughly for 3 min­utes. Pour the resin into an­other mix­ing con­tainer to en­sure that no un­mixed resin is stuck to the walls of your con­tainer. Use a fresh stir­ring stick, and mix for an­other 3 min­utes. Pull the whole con­tainer un­der vac­uum (I man­age around -0.96 bar) and leave it there for 30 min­utes. Depending on your resin, the froth may very well over­flow your mix­ing con­tainer: cy­cle be­tween pulling a vac­uum and let­ting air back in a cou­ple times to pop most of the bub­bles.

Now pour the resin into the mold and go through the vac­uum process again. This time, most of the bub­bles you’re pulling out come from around the em­bed­ment, not from air trapped in the resin, which helps keep the froth­ing down.

Some resins froth up to sev­eral times the liq­uid vol­ume un­der vac­uum! Make sure there’s enough room to ac­co­mo­date this.

My first some­what promis­ing cast was in a borosil­i­cate class cylin­der. I won’t dwell on the looks of this, be­cause I mostly wanted to ex­per­i­ment and an­swer a few burn­ing ques­tions with this pro­to­type:

Q: How vis­i­ble is the fish­ing line in the fi­nal re­sult?

A: Not very! It’s vis­i­ble in the right light, but I don’t

think I’m able to do any bet­ter.

Q: Does CA glue in­ter­fere with the resin in any way?

A: Most resin datasheets say that CA glue can in­ter­fere with

the resin’s cur­ing process, but I can’t tell from this test.

A: Definitely not. Light re­fracts on the curved cylin­der

sur­face mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand the geom­e­try in­side,

de­feat­ing the pur­pose of the model. Cast in a cube.

A week or so later, the cylin­der shat­tered. Resin shrinks as it cures. On to the next pro­to­type!

First pro­to­type cast. Fishing line all but dis­ap­pears in the resin.

At this point I have set­tled on a some­what struc­tured process.

Start with a clean, dis­as­sem­bled move­ment. For in­struc­tions on how to

prop­erly dis­as­sem­ble and clean a watch move­ment, I highly recom­ment Mark

Lovick’s Watch Repair Course.

Assemble the train of wheels with their bridges and seize them by

de­posit­ing small amounts of CA glue on the pin­ions. Just like with the

watch­mak­er’s oil, a sewing nee­dle with a flat spot is per­fect for

pick­ing up a small droplet of CA glue and de­posit­ing it where it’s

needed. Capillary ac­tion wicks it be­tween the com­po­nents. Less is more

when it comes to CA glue: the bond be­tween sur­faces is stronger when no

ex­cess is used, and the cure time is around 30 sec­onds even with­out the

use of an ac­ti­va­tor.

I made a small jig for cut­ting pieces of fish­ing line ac­cu­rately and

squarely out of a janky hand press tool.

Work starts on the train wheel side of the move­ment (often called the

watch­mak­er’s side) be­cause that’s where most of the com­plex­ity lies.

While work­ing here, the move­ment can rest in a move­ment holder. I at­tach

long strands of fish­ing line to the end of each of the bridge screws.

Self-closing tweez­ers hold the bridges in place above where they seat on

the main­plate, and the screw/​fish­ing line combo is threaded through the

screw hole in the bridge into the cor­re­spond­ing holes in the main­plate.

More glue binds the bridges to the fish­ing line.

Subassemblies such as of the key­less works, mo­tion works, bal­ance

as­sem­bly, etc. can be con­structed sep­a­rately and fas­tened as a unit.

Small, flat com­po­nents such as cover plates, in­ter­me­di­ate wheels and cap

jew­els each get their own short studs of fish­ing line. I dip the studs

in CA glue and place it near the cen­ter of mass of the com­po­nent I’m

work­ing on: the fish­ing line’s flat ends al­lows it to stand up­right.

Before start­ing work on the dial side of the move­ment, it must be flipped

over. I trans­fer the as­sem­bly into the jaws of some tweez­ers and ap­ply

clos­ing force with a rub­ber band. The tweez­ers are clamped by “helping

hands” glued to a piece of card­board which al­lows me to spin my work

around. Work con­tin­ues sim­i­larly on the dial side. Finally, some thin

trans­par­ent ny­lon sewing thread at­taches the main­plate to a peg­wood stick

that al­lows me to sus­pend the whole as­sem­bly over a mold, ready for

cast­ing resin.

Speaking of the mold: I bought some 2 mm thick 20x30 cm acrylic sheets.

Foamcore or wood could work as well, but I don’t want the vac­uum pump to

pull air from the mold into the cast­ing. I cut them into 7x10 cm

rec­tan­gles and lined them with “epoxy mold tape” (fancy pack­ing tape

that epoxy resin does not bond to). Then I used some Tec7 con­struc­tion

ad­he­sive to form a cube.

Prototype #2 shows a lot of promise! It’s far from per­fect, though. Here

are some of the things I’ll im­prove for pro­to­type #3 in no par­tic­u­lar

or­der:

I strug­gled with at­tach­ing sub­assem­blies to the main­plate be­cause I need to pre­cisely con­trol the dis­tance be­tween the sub­assem­bly and the tar­get sur­face: too snug and the as­sem­bly ends up crooked, too far away and the glue does­n’t ad­here prop­erly. A proper lab jack (tiny scis­sor lift) might solve this, so one is on the way.

The resin shrunk a lot while cur­ing, most likely be­cause it over­heated. I’ll fo­cus on proper air­flow for my next cast.

People noted that it’s dif­fi­cult to see be­tween the com­po­nents, so I’ll “explode” the next model even more.

The hands are set to an in­valid time. 10:10 is the way to go.

I re­cently sub­mit­ted my PhD the­sis, and while wait­ing for the phys­i­cal copies to get printed I thought I’d write about some­thing you (hopefully) would­n’t no­tice when read­ing it. I wrote it in Typst, not LaTeX. In this post I will talk a bit about what went well and what did­n’t.

Typst (https://​typst.app/) is a mod­ern take on a type­set­ting lan­guage that I think has a real shot at de­thron­ing LaTeX. I would de­scribe the lan­guage as a mix of mark­down and dy­nam­i­cally typed Rust, which may sound weird but is a re­ally nice fit. Day-to-day doc­u­ment writ­ing be­ing mark­down-like is very com­fort­able (certainly much nicer than lit­ter­ing your writ­ing with \). The script­ing lan­guage is pow­er­ful, well thought out, and makes it very easy to jump be­tween code and type­set­ting. For ex­am­ple

This is bold text. The sum of [1, 2, 5, 8] is 16

In the rest of this post, I will talk about some of the things I liked and dis­liked about Typst while writ­ing the the­sis.

The thing that pushed me over the edge to try Typst for my the­sis was a friend telling me his LaTeX the­sis took 90 sec­onds to com­pile to­wards the end. I am far too eas­ily dis­tracted to tol­er­ate 90 sec­ond com­pile times when I’m mak­ing small changes. The Typst com­piler is fast, on small-medium sized doc­u­ments it com­piles fast enough to do live writ­ing in the PDF pre­view. As my the­sis grew be­yond 150 pages, com­pile times dropped a bit. Clean builds take about 15 sec­onds, but it also does in­cre­men­tal com­pi­la­tion so for con­tent changes, it is still nearly in­stant, for lo­cal lay­out changes it takes a sec­ond or two. Even for large global tem­plate changes,  10 sec­onds is a whole lot bet­ter than 90 sec­onds, and I am con­fi­dent that be­ing able to it­er­ate on lay­out and style 9 times faster pro­duced a nicer look­ing re­sult in the end.

The Typst lan­guage is amaz­ingly well thought out. Markdown syn­tax is nicer than Tex syn­tax for gen­eral writ­ing, but what re­ally shines is the script­ing lan­guage. My biggest com­plaint with LaTeX as a lan­guage is that noth­ing is con­sis­tent. Every pack­age de­fines their own lit­tle util­i­ties for even ba­sic things like if-state­ments. It feels like you don’t learn LaTeX, you learn each pack­age in­di­vid­u­ally. Typst on the other hand is a well-de­signed dy­nam­i­cally typed lan­guage. Being Rust in­spired and me be­ing a Rust user meant that it barely feels like I had to learn the lan­guage at all, I can just as­sume that I’m writ­ing Rust. That’s not true as you get into more ad­vanced things of course, but it feels like I know Typst in a way that I don’t think is pos­si­ble with LaTeX.

This is­n’t just philo­soph­i­cal, be­ing able to script Typst is ex­tremely use­ful. For ex­am­ple, a cen­tral part of my the­sis is that there are a lot of hard­ware de­scrip­tion lan­guages out there, and I wanted to come up with a way to cat­e­go­rize them. Over a few years, I have col­lected them all with some meta­data in a toml file (https://​git­lab.com/​The­Zoq2/​list_of_hdls/). Since Typst can parse toml, I could sim­ply use that data to gen­er­ate a fig­ure to put the lan­guages into my tax­on­omy:

Sure, it would be pos­si­ble to do this in many other ways, but hav­ing it self-con­tained in the doc­u­ment is nice, and at this point Typst is one of my favourite script­ing lan­guages, so us­ing it here is a no-brainer and some­thing I did for pretty much all my data pro­cess­ing.

A mod­ern lan­guage of course also comes with mod­ern tools, a com­piler with de­pen­dency man­age­ment, a work­ing lan­guage server pro­to­col in­te­gra­tion for ed­i­tors etc. All that makes it even nicer to work with.

A few times I have tried to un­der­stand la­tex tem­plates, and every time it has ended in frus­tra­tion. I be­lieve it took me longer to re­move a header from our uni­ver­sity pre­sen­ta­tion tem­plate than it did for me to write a new pre­sen­ta­tion tem­plate in Typst. Again, this comes down to the lan­guage be­ing well-thought-out and con­sis­tent. This was also hugely ad­van­ta­geous when tweak­ing my the­sis tem­plate the way I want it. Naturally, this is some­thing of a dou­ble-edged sword, had I used LaTeX I would not have had to make a tem­plate in the first place, but at the same time, mod­i­fy­ing any­thing in that tem­plate would have been much more dif­fi­cult. This way I ended up with every­thing right where I wanted it with­out the frus­tra­tion of fig­ur­ing out how to get the re­sults I wanted.

My the­sis has a lot of code in it, and I hate read­ing code with­out good syn­tax high­light­ing. LaTeX’s syn­tax high­light­ing sys­tems leave a lot to be de­sired, but Typst’s cer­tainly does not. It does have built in sup­port for text­mate gram­mars, the same sys­tem used by sub­lime text for syn­tax high­light­ing, but for var­i­ous rea­sons I de­cided not to use them. Instead, I just used Typst’s show rules with regex. For ex­am­ple,

will syn­tax high­light Spade con­di­tion­als. My syn­tax high­light­ing de­f­i­n­i­tions¹ are… more more com­pli­cated but pro­duce re­sults that I am very happy with. At some point, I even ended up pars­ing a sub­set of Spade in Typst with a re­cur­sive de­scent parser be­cause I re­ally wanted to high­light named ar­gu­ments. Was that a good way to spend my time? Debatable, but it cer­tainly was not some­thing I would have dreamt of do­ing in LaTeX.

LaTeX er­ror mes­sages are aw­ful. Typst is gen­er­ally much bet­ter with er­rors that point to the right place, gives ac­cu­rate in­for­ma­tion about what is wrong, and does­n’t fill the ter­mi­nal with garbage. No more “Missing $ in­serted!”.

Typst’s bib­li­og­ra­phy man­age­ment leaves some things to be de­sired when writ­ing a whole the­sis. The first road­block I en­coun­tered was that you can only have one bib­li­og­ra­phy sec­tion and file per doc­u­ment. One per doc­u­ment is a deal breaker be­cause I need one for the in­tro­duc­tion, and one per in­cluded pa­per. My mas­ter bib file makes heavy use of Bibtex vari­ables which are in­cluded from other sources, this does not work in Typst. I ended up solv­ing it with a Makefile that merges my files into one be­fore go­ing to Typst, but that’s not ideal ²

The multi-bib­li­og­ra­phy prob­lem was worse, but luck­ily https://​typst.app/​uni­verse/​pack­age/​alexan­dria came along as I was work­ing to save the day. It re­quires a lit­tle bit of work per bib­li­og­ra­phy so I would ab­solutely have pre­ferred an au­to­mated sys­tem where I just do #bibliography(…) and would in­sert all the ci­ta­tions I’ve used since last time, but Alexandria did the job.

Then there is the style of the bib­li­og­ra­phy… At first glance, it looks fine but when you have an ad­vi­sor that is very picky about bib­li­og­ra­phy styles, things start to go wrong. For ex­am­ple, pa­per ti­tles should be writ­ten in sen­tence case with quotes around them, for ex­am­ple:

[1] F. Skarman and O. Gustafsson, “Spade: An ex­pres­sion-based HDL with pipelines,” in Proc. Workshop Open-Source Des. Automat., Apr. 2023.

But in the Bibtex file it is very com­mon for the ti­tles to ap­pear in their orig­i­nal ti­tle case form (Spade: An Expression-Based HDL With Pipelines). By de­fault, Typst does not seem to do this con­ver­sion, but it can be turned on with a cus­tom .csl file. However, then it will not do it quite right. “Expression-Based” turns into “expression-Based” for ex­am­ple. In the end, I did the con­ver­sion to sen­tence case man­u­ally.

The sys­tem is also kind of strange about what in­for­ma­tion it in­cludes in ref­er­ences. For ex­am­ple, the @TechReport class in Bibtex has an in­sti­tute field. This does not get in­cluded, but chang­ing it to pub­lisher (which AFAIK is not a stan­dard field in Bibtex) makes it work.

I also found out that book ti­tles should not be writ­ten with quotes, but with ital­ics. I set a rule to match on book in my CSL field but it did not have an ef­fect on @Book, only on @InCollection. In gen­eral, the bib­li­og­ra­phy man­age­ment is death by a thou­sand pa­per­cuts, and a lot of them are caused by a very opaque trans­la­tion from Bibtex fields to CSL…

Wait, did­n’t I say that the er­ror mes­sages are good be­fore? I did,but they are only good in sim­ple cases. For ex­am­ple, with the Alexandria li­brary, a bib­li­og­ra­phy that fails to com­pile only says “failed to parse bib­li­og­ra­phy” and does not give fur­ther er­rors. Errors in state­ful show rules also do not give any bread­crumbs back to where the er­ror was trig­gered which makes them hard to track down. In gen­eral, I would like to see a longer trace­back for er­rors to avoid hav­ing feel like I’m writ­ing la­tex again by bi­nary search­ing re­cent changes.

My the­sis also has the dreaded Layout did not con­verge in 5 at­tempts warn­ing which is pretty much im­pos­si­ble to de­bug cur­rently. In my case, things turn out fine, but it is a bit sketchy. I be­lieve this is be­ing worked on.

LaTeX is every­where. My early pa­pers were of course writ­ten in la­tex and I had to con­vert them to Typst. This was sur­pris­ingly easy with Pandoc which did 95% of the work with me just hav­ing to do a bit of fi­nal cleanup. Unfortunately, I also wrote a few new pa­pers for the the­sis that will be sub­mit­ted later, and that’s a more com­pli­cated sit­u­a­tion since jour­nals de­mand LaTeX code. My work­flow so far has been to write the ini­tial ver­sion of pa­pers in Typst, sub­mit the PDF as gen­er­ated by Typst, then for the fi­nal ver­sion sub­mit a con­verted ver­sion.

For con­ver­sion, I don’t be­lieve pan­doc works (or does­n’t work the way I want it) so I had wrote my own tool ³. It lets me do 90% of the con­tent and lay­out in Typst, use Typst for gen­er­at­ing fig­ures and code snip­pets, and then I can in­sert style tweaks with in­line LaTeX. The Typst com­piler be­ing open source was of huge help here as I just hook into that. I will talk more about that tool in a fu­ture post once one of my pa­pers com­piled us­ing it is made pub­lic

A big down­side of this is that it gen­er­ates la­tex with \includepdf for things like in­line code. I am hop­ing pub­lish­ers will not count those as fig­ures and be weirded out by them…

Everyone also knows LaTeX, so if I want to use Typst in col­lab­o­ra­tion, I force every­one I want to work with to learn it. My ad­vi­sor was not su­per pleased with that 😇

The Typst ecosys­tem is young. Being able to whip up a the­sis tem­plate and do­ing all the tweaks to make it just the way I want it is great. On the other hand, since I am prob­a­bly the first per­son at my uni­ver­sity to do it meant I had to whip up a tem­plate. For sub­mit­ting to con­fer­ences and jour­nals, there are Typst tem­plates, but they are not flaw­less. The IEEE tem­plate only has con­fer­ence vari­ant, not a jour­nal vari­ant. The LLNCS tem­plate I found on git looked OK but had the wrong mar­gins, so our pa­per ended up be­ing slightly longer when con­verted to la­tex.

With all this in mind, would I rec­om­mend us­ing Typst for a PhD Thesis? If you are like me,   absolutely   prob­a­bly. I like play­ing with pro­gram­ming lan­guages, I’m eas­ily frus­trated by tools that bother me. I also much pre­fer a tool that I can tweak to get ex­actly the way I want over a tool that “just works” out of the box but where it is hard to tweak. In the end, I don’t think I com­pro­mised on the qual­ity of the doc­u­ment, the quick it­er­a­tion prob­a­bly made things look bet­ter than they would have oth­er­wise. It cer­tainly took some ef­fort to work around a few is­sues, and some ex­tra work set­ting up a tem­plate, but that was fun work com­pared to hav­ing to suf­fer through LaTeX’s an­noy­ances.

If you’re not like me and want a sys­tem that works out of the box, Typst to­day prob­a­bly is­n’t the right choice for a PhD the­sis. But I would still rec­om­mend play­ing with Typst for smaller things but leave the big doc­u­ments to LaTeX, for now.

Updated June 23 2025: Changed ab­solutely to prob­a­bly in the con­clu­sion and added the ‘advisors per­spec­tive sec­tion be­low’

My ad­vi­sor had a some­what dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on this and I think it is worth post­ing that here. This is es­sen­tially taken ver­ba­tim from a LinkedIn com­ment where we dis­cussed it:

“The thing is that you HAD to tweak it to make things look the way they should. Not sure that is a ben­e­fit.

Would I, as a su­per­vi­sor, rec­om­mend some­one to use Typst if they are in a field where all man­u­scripts are writ­ten in LaTeX? No. The fact that Frans is clever and a good pro­gram­mer helped for sure. But think twice. Thrice if you are not a good pro­gram­mer. And ask Frans for the scripts he de­vel­oped to move things be­tween Typst and LaTeX.

It is sim­ply not ma­ture enough for most peo­ple to be used at this stage when you have to pro­duce doc­u­ments look­ing a par­tic­u­lar way. Unless you are will­ing to spend much time on tweak­ing things etc. It may be ma­ture for sure and some­one will have to con­tribute to make it more ma­ture for sure.

“Good” thing from a su­per­vi­sor per­spec­tive is that I barely edited any text in the source at all, but had to let Frans edit the text (and for­mat). Quite in­ef­fi­cient though.

Despite the dis­agree­ment on the pro­ce­dure, I can­not stress enough that the end re­sult was great though! Both tech­ni­cally and lay­out­wise.”

He cer­tainly has a point here, es­pe­cially need­ing to be in­ter­ested in work­ing around is­sues and need­ing some pro­gram­ming ex­pe­ri­ence to get things work­ing per­fectly. The prob­lem of hav­ing to spend time ad­just­ing things is in my opin­ion hard to quan­tify since it trades easy fun up­front work for frus­tra­tion over other as­pects of the lan­guage.

Until I ran VaccinateCA my sin­gle most im­por­tant ca­reer con­tri­bu­tion might have been writ­ing about salary ne­go­ti­a­tion. That es­say has been read by mil­lions of peo­ple. Of those peo­ple, a rel­a­tively small per­cent­age send me email to tell me that the ad­vice has worked for them. I pre­vi­ously kept a spread­sheet of the im­pact they shared with me, and it ticked over into eight fig­ures of raises.

I thought I’d do a read of the es­say, so peo­ple can share it with fam­ily and friends that might con­nect more with au­dio than they do with text. Also, I think there is a trust fac­tor to ex­hor­ta­tions that au­dio as a for­mat achieves bet­ter than text does. And the es­say is, in ma­te­r­ial part, an ex­hor­ta­tion as much as it is sim­ply ad­vice.

For the ben­e­fit of peo­ple who just want the new bits, I’ve called them out with Patrick notes:, though they’re also spo­ken in the episode this time.

This episode is brought to you by Mercury, the fin­tech trusted by 200K+ com­pa­nies — from first mile­stones to run­ning com­plex sys­tems. Mercury of­fers bank­ing that truly un­der­stands star­tups and scales with them. Start to­day at Mercury.com

Mercury is a fi­nan­cial tech­nol­ogy com­pany, not a bank. Banking ser­vices pro­vided by Choice Financial Group, Column N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

(00:00) Intro

(03:25) Why ne­go­ti­a­tion mat­ters

(05:21) Shifting your mind­set to em­brace ne­go­ti­a­tion

(06:49) Your coun­ter­party does not share your men­tal model of ne­go­ti­a­tion

(12:46) Your ne­go­ti­a­tion started be­fore you ap­plied to this job

(17:21) When does a salary ne­go­ti­a­tion hap­pen?

(19:38) Sponsor: Mercury

(23:16) The first rule is what every­one tells you it is: never give a num­ber first

(28:45) Listen to what peo­ple tell you. Repeat it back to them.

(33:22) Research, re­search, re­search

(37:13) New in­for­ma­tion is valu­able and can be traded for things you want

(41:20) You have a multi-di­men­sional pref­er­ence set. Use it.

(44:08:) For your fur­ther pe­rusal

Welcome to Complex Systems where we dis­cuss the tech­ni­cal, or­ga­ni­za­tional, and hu­man fac­tors un­der­pin­ning why the world works the way it does.

Patrick: Hi. Hello every­body. My name is Patrick McKenzie, bet­ter known as pa­tio11 on the Internet. I’m here to­day alone in the stu­dio to record an es­say about salary ne­go­ti­a­tion, which I wrote a num­ber of years ago and pub­lished at kalzumeus.com. This might have been the most sin­gle im­pact­ful thing I did in the course of my ca­reer. I’ve kept a folder in Gmail for peo­ple who write in to tell me that they ac­tu­ally got a salary ne­go­ti­a­tion bump as a re­sult of this.

And I kept a spread­sheet about it un­til the low eight fig­ures be­fore keep­ing that spread­sheet was a source of stress. A cou­ple hun­dred thou­sand peo­ple read it every year. And of course many of them have told me it worked out well for them. And some­one sug­gested re­cently, you know, some peo­ple get a bet­ter ex­pe­ri­ence from lis­ten­ing to things than they get from read­ing them.

And this in par­tic­u­lar is an es­say which in­cludes quite a bit of ex­hor­ta­tion. And I think hear­ing a trusted voice say that in your ear might be help­ful for some job seek­ers. So, I will do a read­ing of this and then back on next week with a more typ­i­cal topic.

Imagine some­thing a wee bit out­side your com­fort zone. Nothing scan­dalous. Just some­thing you don’t do of­ten, don’t par­tic­u­larly en­joy, and slightly more chal­leng­ing than to­tally triv­ial. Maybe recit­ing po­etry while si­mul­ta­ne­ously stand­ing on one foot. If I told you I would pay you a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars if you did five min­utes of po­etry recital while stand­ing on one foot, would you do it?

It’s an ab­surd im­age, but play it straight. There is no hid­den gotcha here. You won’t be video­taped. Your friends will never see you make a fool of your­self. The rev­o­lu­tion will not be YouTubed. The of­fer is ex­actly as sim­ple as you think it is. Poetry, foot, a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars. Would you read po­etry for me?

Of course you would. You’d be scream­ingly stu­pid not to. In fact, not only would you read po­etry, you’d prob­a­bly take a po­etry class to make sure you did it right or go to the gym to ver­ify. Yep, sure enough, I can stand on one foot. Phew, pass me the Shakespeare. If you could­n’t stand on one foot, you’d fix that be­cause you know that it is much eas­ier than other things you rou­tinely ac­com­plish, and you sud­denly have a hun­dred thou­sand won­der­ful rea­sons to learn it too.

What if you were talk­ing about this at din­ner with your friends and one of them said, “Oh no, I’d never do that. I just don’t do po­etry. I’m an en­gi­neer and be­sides my fa­ther told me that peo­ple who stand on one foot look silly and what do I need a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars for any­how?” You would not clap them on the back and say, “Damn straight! Man, po­ets al­ways try­ing to tempt vir­tu­ous en­gi­neers into their weird po­etry spout­ing, flamingo stand­ing ways.”

You’d say, “Dude, it’s five min­utes. Heck, I’ll help you prac­tice.” This is pretty much how I feel every time I talk to my en­gi­neer­ing friends about salary ne­go­ti­a­tion. We over­whelm­ingly suck at it. We have turned suck­ing at it into a per­verse badge of virtue. We make no af­fir­ma­tive ef­forts to un-suck our­selves and to the ex­tent we read about it at all, we read bad ad­vice and re­peat it, pre­tend­ing that this makes us wise.

Dude, it’s five min­utes. Let’s un-suck your ne­go­ti­a­tion.

New to the site? Hiya. I gen­er­ally write as an en­gi­neer for en­gi­neers. Non-engineers can ben­e­fit from many of the same tech­niques, though the hir­ing mar­ket is­n’t nearly as in your fa­vor at the mo­ment as it is for en­gi­neers in most ma­jor US metro ar­eas.

Patrick notes: As an aside, 10 years later, peo­ple say, would I change the ad­vice in this es­say given the cur­rent hir­ing mar­ket for en­gi­neers? I would not change a word. So I’m say­ing that ex­plic­itly.

Your salary ne­go­ti­a­tion, which rou­tinely takes less than five min­utes to con­clude, has an out­sized in­flu­ence on what your com­pen­sa­tion is.

Compensation can in­clude money or things which are more or less fun­gi­ble re­place­ments for money, but it can also in­clude in­ter­est­ing things which you value from more time with your fam­ily to op­por­tu­ni­ties to do tasks you find ful­fill­ing to perks which make a mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence in your day-to-day qual­ity of life.

That makes your ne­go­ti­a­tion five very im­por­tant min­utes. You gen­er­ally can’t do a to­tally bang up job on any five min­utes of work this year and have your boss give you an ex­tra $5,000. You can triv­ially pick up $5,000 in salary ne­go­ti­a­tions just by suck­ing less. Since salaries are shock­ingly durable over time, par­tic­u­larly if one is not good at ne­go­ti­at­ing, you can ex­pect a $5,000 in­crease in salary to com­pound with your stan­dard an­nual read-the-HR-chart per­cent raise, cause a sim­i­lar in­crease in your 401k con­tri­bu­tion, which also com­pounds, and es­tab­lish a higher peg for any fur­ther jobs you take if you’re un­savvy and al­low those other jobs ac­cess to your prior salary his­tory, at any rate. Accordingly, over the next 10 years, the value of $5,000 a year ex­tra salary is close to a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars gross, and the value of $15,000 a year ex­tra, very achiev­able if you are, for ex­am­ple, a young en­gi­neer who does­n’t re­al­ize that the hir­ing mar­ket is on fire right now, even out­side of tech epi­cen­ters like Silicon Valley, is over a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars even net of taxes.

Patrick notes: As an aside, over the course of the last decade, I know peo­ple who quite rou­tinely got $25,000 or more and not in­fre­quently got more than a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars from ne­go­ti­at­ing well for mid-ca­reer tech pro­fes­sion­als. But I ac­tu­ally knew that was achiev­able be­fore I wrote this es­say. As a bit of au­thor’s com­men­tary, one of the rea­sons I chose $5,000 rather than quot­ing $25,000 was I felt more peo­ple would be­lieve it and there­fore at­tempt to put the ad­vice into prac­tice. But you should trust me on this topic, I think, any­how.

We’ll dis­cuss tac­ti­cal ad­vice in a mo­ment, but let’s talk about the psy­chol­ogy of ne­go­ti­a­tion first. I think that mid­dle class Americans are so­cial­ized from a very young age to view ne­go­ti­a­tion as some­thing that is vaguely dis­rep­utable and en­gaged in only by poor peo­ple. Think of the as­so­ci­a­tions you have with the word hag­gling.

Do you think of a suc­cess­ful young pro­fes­sional talk­ing about thou­sands of dol­lars in a brightly lit of­fice? No. You prob­a­bly think of an old woman ar­gu­ing over a triv­ial sum of money in a dirty flea mar­ket. If I were a lit­tle more para­noid and a lit­tle more Marxist, I’d hon­estly think that you’re so mis­in­formed about re­al­ity that it is al­most prima fa­cie ev­i­dence of a con­spir­acy to keep you in the dark about this, to the ad­van­tage of peo­ple who A) you won’t ne­go­ti­ate with, and B) who will feel ab­solutely no com­punc­tions about ne­go­ti­at­ing with you.

Principally, this will be your em­ploy­ers. People say that your house is the biggest pur­chase you’ll ever make, but it won’t be the most con­se­quen­tial ne­go­ti­a­tion. If you’re sane only about 25% or so of your gross in­come is sub­ject to the re­sults of real es­tate ne­go­ti­a­tions. Close to 100% is sub­ject to the re­sults of salary ne­go­ti­a­tions.

Thus, your salary ne­go­ti­a­tions are prob­a­bly go­ing to be the most im­por­tant fi­nan­cial de­ci­sions you will ever make. We so­cial­ize mid­dle class Americans to go into them un­pre­pared, de­mo­ti­vated, and fear­ful of suc­cess. The re­al­ity is that rich, suc­cess­ful peo­ple ne­go­ti­ate. This is one im­por­tant way in which they get and stay rich.

It is an all-day-every-day thing in much of the busi­ness world, which is where most rich peo­ple get their money.

Salary ne­go­ti­a­tions are very asym­met­ri­cal. Companies know this and rou­tinely ex­ploit it. Job seek­ers don’t, per­haps be­cause they think do­ing so would be un­fair, and the word ex­ploit makes them acutely un­com­fort­able.

So we of­ten de­fault by pre­tend­ing that the em­ployer is eval­u­at­ing the ne­go­ti­a­tion like we would. This is not true and act­ing like it is true will harm both your in­ter­ests and the in­ter­ests of your fu­ture em­ployer. For ex­am­ple, many peo­ple’s men­tal model of em­ploy­ment is that an em­ployee with a $60,000 a year salary costs about $60,000 a year to hire.

If they ne­go­ti­ate $65,000 in­stead, that’s $5,000 ex­tra which has to come from some­where. If the ne­go­ti­a­tion breaks down, then that is $60,000 saved. This men­tal model is bro­ken. First, get into the habit of see­ing em­ploy­ees like em­ploy­ers see them: in terms of fully loaded costs. To hire some­one you need to pay for their salary, true, but you also have taxes, a ben­e­fits pack­age, em­ployer con­tri­bu­tions to re­tire­ment, health­care, that free soda your HR de­part­ment loves men­tion­ing in the job ads, and what have you.

Patrick notes: A bit of trivia: for a US em­ployer of pro­fes­sion­als, the largest com­po­nent af­ter salary/​stock-based com­pen­sa­tion is usu­ally health­care, fol­lowed by pay­roll taxes.

The fully loaded costs of em­ploy­ees are much higher than their salary: ex­actly how much higher de­pends on your lo­cal­i­ty’s laws, your ben­e­fits pack­age, and a bunch of other HR ad­min­istrivia. But a rea­son­able guessti­mate is be­tween 150% and 200% of their salary.

Patrick notes: As an aside, lower than that out­side the tech in­dus­try and en­gi­neer­ing pro­fes­sions. But if you’re ball­park­ing at 140% across most of the pop­u­lace, you’re not in a crazy place.

The fully loaded cost of an en­gi­neer re­ceiv­ing mar­ket salaries these days in California or New York is close to $20,000 a month. It is only $10,000 a month if they’re re­ceiv­ing a heav­ily be­low mar­ket salary, such as if they’re work­ing for a startup.

If you have a kid brother who ma­jored in Flemish dance and got a mod­est full-time job at a non­profit, his fully loaded cost is still prob­a­bly $4,000 a month or more.

Patrick notes: As an aside, those quotes for mar­ket salaries are very stale at this point. Also the quote for the value of a Flemish dance ma­jor’s salary is un­for­tu­nately stale 10 years later, less be­cause the value of Flemish dance has in­creased and more be­cause the value of a dol­lar has de­creased.

This is a round­about way of telling you that com­pa­nies are not sen­si­tive to small dif­fer­ences in em­ployee wages be­cause em­ploy­ees are so darned ex­pen­sive any­how. You see $5,000 and think, “Holy cow, even af­ter taxes, that’s a whole new va­ca­tion. $5,000. $5,000. It would be so very, very greedy of me to ask for 5,000 whole dol­lars.”

The HR de­part­ment sees $5,000 and thinks “Meh, even af­ter we kick in the ex­tra taxes, that’s only about 3% of their fully loaded cost for this year any­how, or seven hun­dredths of 1% of that team’s hir­ing bud­get. I won­der if the cafe­te­ria has car­rot cake to­day.”

Patrick notes: As an aside, if you ac­tu­ally join the cor­po­rate world and do bud­get­ing for teams, you will not be bud­get­ing in dol­lars. You will be bud­get­ing in—and good­ness, I hate this word in the depths of my soul—head­count. Because head­count A and head­count B, mean­ing per­son A and per­son B, are close enough in wages and close enough in costs that at a de­part­ment level rather than hav­ing your ab­strac­tion be­ing, well, we spent 2 mil­lion and $20,000 on salary and re­lated ex­penses this year, it’s much eas­ier to com­mu­ni­cate: Okay, you pre­vi­ously had bud­get for 20 head­count. You have gone to your boss and asked for more bud­get for the next year, and they have given you two ad­di­tional head­count. And again, as long as you’re within the salary bands for your com­pany, no­body cares what those two ad­di­tional quote un­quote head­count get from you in the ne­go­ti­at­ing room.

Virtually any amount of money avail­able to you per­son­ally is mouse drop­pings to your prospec­tive em­ployer. They will not feel of­fended if you ask for it. I re­ceived a com­ment that this is un­true for star­tups by some­one to­day. For a funded startup which has enough en­gi­neers to war­rant a foos­ball table, the com­pany pay­roll is well north of a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars a month.

Making a new hire is a big com­mit­ment, but they still have a lot of flex­i­bil­ity on the de­tails be­cause the de­tails do not shave months off their run­way. We’ve been talk­ing about your em­ployer as an ab­strac­tion, but in the in­stant case you’re talk­ing to an ac­tual per­son. Let’s call him Bob. It’s Bob’s job to get you signed with the com­pany as cheaply as pos­si­ble, but Bob is not su­per mo­ti­vated to do so be­cause Bob is not spend­ing Bob’s money to hire you.

Bob is spend­ing Bob’s bud­get. Bob gen­er­ally does not get large per­for­mance in­cen­tives for shav­ing money off of his hir­ing bud­get. You get a new MacBook if you con­vince Bob to give you $5,000 ex­tra, but Bob gets, if he is anom­alously lucky, a din­ner at TGI Fridays if he con­vinces you to take $5,000 less.

In fact, there are many or­ga­ni­za­tions and many Bobs for whom power, sta­tus, and money come from ask­ing for more bud­get every year. If you turn out to be on the ex­pen­sive side, that is great for Bob be­cause A) he man­ages a high pow­ered peon, so he must be a high pow­ered man­ager, and B) this will help Bob get more bud­get next quar­ter.

So if you’re wor­ried about what Bob will think of your moral char­ac­ter, or if you want to com­pen­sate Bob be­cause you feel you owe him for this job op­por­tu­nity, do Bob a solid and ne­go­ti­ate in a spir­ited fash­ion with him. You don’t owe Bob for giv­ing you this job op­por­tu­nity, by the way. Please in­ter­nal­ize this.

Everyone in this dis­cus­sion is a busi­ness­man. Some might call them­selves reg­u­lar em­ploy­ees, which just means they’re busi­ness­men with self-con­fi­dence is­sues and poor busi­ness skills. If the deal makes eco­nomic sense, it will hap­pen. If it does­n’t, firm hand­shakes will be ex­changed, non-spe­cific promises will be ut­tered, and every­one will for­get about this dis­cus­sion in a mat­ter of hours. You will not be black­balled for ne­go­ti­at­ing. Bob could­n’t care less, and even if he did care, he has bet­ter things to do with his time than worry about a can­di­date he did­n’t hire. Bob is work­ing through a list of a dozen peo­ple right now, and his man­ager Dave is be­ing such a hard case about that pro­ject sched­ule, and he’s not sure he can make his daugh­ter’s pi­ano recital, and the cafe­te­ri­a’s car­rot cake was a lit­tle dry. Bob is far, far less in­vested in this ne­go­ti­a­tion than you are.

Your ne­go­ti­a­tion does­n’t hap­pen in a vac­uum. Generic ca­reer ad­vice is a lit­tle out­side the scope of this post, though I’ve pre­vi­ously writ­ten a bit with en­gi­neers in mind that folks from many walks of life tell me was use­ful.

But to make a long story short, many peo­ple think job searches go some­thing like this: You see an ad for a job on Monster.com or wher­ever. You send in a re­sume. You get an in­ter­view. You get asked for salary re­quire­ments. You get of­fered your salary re­quire­ment plus 5%. And then you try to ne­go­ti­ate that of­fer if you can bring your­self to do it.

This is an ef­fec­tive strat­egy for job search­ing if you en­joy al­ter­nat­ing bouts of be­ing un­em­ployed, be­ing poorly com­pen­sated, and be­ing treated like a dis­pos­able peon. I served three years as a dis­pos­able peon in a Japanese mega­corp and might be pro­ject­ing a tad bit here. Regardless, my loss is your gain.

You will have much, much bet­ter re­sults if your job search looks some­thing more like:

(Optional but rec­om­mended) Establish a rep­u­ta­tion in your field as some­one who de­liv­ers mea­sur­able re­sults vis-a-vis im­prov­ing rev­enue or re­duc­ing costs.

Have a hir­ing man­ager talk with you specif­i­cally about an open­ing that they want you specif­i­cally to fill.

Talk in­for­mally (and then pos­si­bly for­mally) and come to the con­clu­sion that this would be a great thing if both sides could come to a mu­tu­ally ful­fill­ing of­fer.

Let them take a stab at what that mu­tu­ally ful­fill­ing of­fer would look like.

Suggest ways that they could im­prove it such that the path is cleared for you do­ing that voodoo that you do so well to im­prove their rev­enue and/​or re­duce their costs.

(Optional) Give the guy hir­ing you a re­sume to send to HR for their records. Nobody will read it be­cause re­sumes are an in­sti­tu­tion cre­ated to mean that no one has to read re­sumes. Since no one will read it, we put it in the process where it lit­er­ally does­n’t mat­ter whether it hap­pens or not, be­cause if you had your job of­fer con­tin­gent on a doc­u­ment that every­one knows no one reads, that would be pretty eff­ing stu­pid now, would­n’t it?

You might think that de­sir­able jobs at well-man­aged com­pa­nies (Google, Microsoft, hot startup FooWithTheWhat.ly, etc) have lay­ers and lay­ers of bu­reau­cratic scar tis­sue (a great im­age from 37signals) to en­sure that their hir­ing will con­form to es­tab­lished processes and that of­fers will not be given to can­di­dates sourced by us­ing in­for­mal net­works and in­ter­per­sonal con­nec­tions.

If you be­lieve this, you have a dan­ger­ously in­com­plete men­tal model of how the world op­er­ates. I have a spe­cific rec­om­men­da­tion for you to make that model more com­plete: start talk­ing to peo­ple who ac­tu­ally work for those com­pa­nies and who have hir­ing au­thor­ity. Virtually no com­pany has a hir­ing process which is ac­cu­rately ex­plained by blog posts about the com­pany.

No com­pany any­where has a hir­ing process which is ac­cu­rately ex­plained by their own doc­u­ments about how the hir­ing process works. I won’t give names, but all of the fol­low­ing are com­pa­nies you’ve heard of:

* Ironclad non-com­pete with an IP as­sign­ment pro­vi­sion of ma­jor multi­na­tional… struck from the con­tract with four sen­tences of dis­cus­sion.

* Major pop­u­lar tech em­ployer of­fered de­sir­able em­ployee $X as a salary be­cause “it was the max the HR de­part­ment al­lows for that po­si­tion.” He got hired that week at $2X. All par­ties — hir­ing or­ga­ni­za­tion, HR, and em­ployee — think they pulled one over on the other par­tic­i­pants.

* [Deleted funny story]. I now can’t tell you the funny story, be­cause lit­er­ally two hours be­fore pub­li­ca­tion some­one emailed me for ad­vice about a sit­u­a­tion that he be­lieves is in­cred­i­bly un­just at his com­pany, and it is ex­actly the funny story to the let­ter. Now if I tell you the funny story he might think “Dang, I write Patrick in con­fi­dence and it ends up on the blog.” So, no funny story to­day. Suffice it to say that in my old age I treat Dilbert less as farce and more as doc­u­men­tary.

Patrick notes: As an aside, peo­ple do oc­ca­sion­ally come to me 10 years later and say, “So can you tell the funny story now?” And I don’t re­mem­ber what the spe­cific funny story was, al­though I have an inkling of the genre that it was.

* “We can’t hire en­gi­neers fast enough through our stan­dard processes so, meh, I guess we’ll cir­cum­vent them by just toss­ing $1 mil­lion per em­ployee at whomever they cur­rently work for. Who cares, it is­n’t my mil­lion.”

Patrick notes: I’ve heard that sub­se­quently ex­plained by the M&A team, which is the team that is be­ing spo­ken of here obliquely, that be­cause of var­i­ous fe­lic­i­ties within the com­pany, the M&A team has a large bud­get di­rected from on high to make sure that the com­pany is able to route around its own processes for get­ting smart peo­ple into the com­pany and some­times get­ting pro­jects off the ground. And dif­fer­ent or­ga­ni­za­tions would have dif­fer­ent pref­er­ences as to which of the two was M&A’s larger pri­or­ity.

Only ne­go­ti­ate salary af­ter you have agree­ment in prin­ci­ple from some­one with hir­ing au­thor­ity that, if a mu­tu­ally ac­cept­able com­pen­sa­tion can be agreed upon, you will be hired.

This is re­ally, re­ally im­por­tant be­cause it has di­rect im­pli­ca­tions for your ne­go­ti­at­ing strat­egy. First, the com­pany is go­ing to spend a lot of time and ef­fort on get­ting you to the point of agree­ment-in-prin­ci­ple. Pretend you’ve gone through six rounds of in­ter­views. (You prob­a­bly won’t if you get hired on in­for­mal net­works, be­cause all bar­ri­ers van­ish when im­por­tant peo­ple want a deal to get done, but let me give some ad­vice to some­one a lit­tle less well-sit­u­ated.) Do some quick men­tal math on what that ac­tu­ally cost the com­pany, with ref­er­ence to “one man-month of an en­gi­neer’s time costs $20k” like we dis­cussed ear­lier. You’ll quickly reach the con­clu­sion that the com­pany has spent thou­sands of dol­lars just talk­ing to you, and that does­n’t even count the thou­sands they spent de­cid­ing to talk to you in­stead of who­ever is­n’t in the room right now. Walking away from the ne­go­ti­a­tion means that they lose all that in­vest­ment. (Yeah, sunk cost fal­lacy and all, but since peo­ple pre­dictably act in this fash­ion you should, well, pre­dict that they will act in this fash­ion.) They re­ally want to reach an agree­ment with you.

Patrick notes: As an aside, I think I would say 10 years later, as some­one who has been un­der the gun for a num­ber of weeks and try­ing to find a can­di­date for a po­si­tion, you pay an on­go­ing tax to your pro­duc­tiv­ity at the other parts of your job when you have an open role that you are ac­tively in­ter­view­ing peo­ple for, try­ing to suss out can­di­dates on LinkedIn, ask­ing peo­ple for rec­om­men­da­tions, etc., etc. Your busi­ness needs that per­son to progress or at least be­lieves it does. And you would like to get to the other parts of your job, which are for most hir­ing man­agers things that you are scored for much more di­rectly than your per­for­mance in ac­tu­ally hir­ing. And so, if you have a can­di­date who is so close to the fin­ish line and who you are happy with in terms of their like­li­hood of be­ing the ap­pro­pri­ate fit, you re­ally don’t want to lose on the last day over a triv­ial amount of salary. And so, you be­come very in­cen­tivized to just say yes. In the same way that a per­son who is des­per­ate for a job be­comes very in­cen­tivized to just say yes if they feel like, “Oh no, if I don’t say yes to the first thing that is said out of the coun­ter­par­ty’s mouth, I’ll be un­em­ployed again for the next three or six months.”

Patrick: The sec­ond im­pli­ca­tion is that the in­ner serf wor­ry­ing “If I even at­tempt to ne­go­ti­ate this, the deal will fall through” is wor­ry­ing for noth­ing. They’ve got thou­sands in­vested in this dis­cus­sion by this point. They want you. The ab­solute worst out­come of ne­go­ti­at­ing an of­fer in good faith is that you will get ex­actly the con­tents of that of­fer.

Let me say that again for em­pha­sis: ne­go­ti­at­ing never makes worth­while of­fers worse. This means you need what po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tists call a com­mit­ment strat­egy: you al­ways, as a mat­ter of pol­icy, ne­go­ti­ate all of­fers. (In this wide world I’m sure you can find a com­pany who still makes ex­plod­ing of­fers, where you get one yay-or-nay and then the of­fer is gone. You have a sim­ple re­course to them: refuse them and deal with peo­ple who are will­ing to be pro­fes­sion­als. You’re not a peas­ant. Don’t act like one.)

This also means you do not start ne­go­ti­at­ing un­til you al­ready have a Yes-If. (Yes-If we agree on terms.) Do not start ne­go­ti­at­ing from No-But. (No-But we might hire you any­way if you’re re­ally, re­ally eff­ing cheap.) You don’t want to work for a No-But for the same rea­sons that smart em­ploy­ers hate hir­ing can­di­dates who are a No-But (No-But maybe if not on my team, etc). If they’re lean­ing to not hir­ing you, you will com­pro­mise ex­ces­sively on ne­go­ti­a­tion to get them to hire you. Compromising ex­ces­sively is not the point of the ex­er­cise. It is a sell­er’s mar­ket for tal­ent right now: sell to some­one who is happy to buy.

This means that any dis­cus­sion of com­pen­sa­tion prior to hear­ing Yes-If is pre­ma­ture. If you’re still at the job in­ter­view and you’re talk­ing price, you are do­ing some­thing wrong. (Read the room: it is en­tirely pos­si­ble that you came for a job in­ter­view, fin­ished it, and pro­ceeded di­rectly to a salary ne­go­ti­a­tion. That’s prob­a­bly sub­op­ti­mal, but it is OK. Just don’t give the em­ployer the op­tion of hav­ing the sched­ule be job in­ter­view, salary ne­go­ti­a­tion, and back to job in­ter­view if they dis­cover that you have a spine.) The ideal res­o­lu­tion to the job in­ter­view is for both sides to be op­ti­mistic about the arrange­ment, and then you close with a warm hand­shake and “I look for­ward to re­ceiv­ing your of­fer by, oh, would to­mor­row be enough time for you to run the num­bers?”

You then have a high like­li­hood of do­ing your salary ne­go­ti­a­tion over email, which is likely to your ad­van­tage ver­sus do­ing it in real time. Email gives you ar­bi­trary time to pre­pare your re­sponses. Especially for en­gi­neers, you are likely less dis­ad­van­taged by email than you are by hav­ing an ex­pe­ri­enced ne­go­tia­tor talk­ing to you.

Every hand­book on ne­go­ti­a­tion and every blog post will tell you not to give a num­ber first. This ad­vice is al­most al­ways right. It is so right, you have to con­struct crazy hy­po­thet­i­cals to find edge cases where it would not be right.

For ex­am­ple, if your pre­vi­ous salary was set dur­ing the dot-com bub­ble and you are ne­go­ti­at­ing af­ter the bub­ble popped, you might men­tion it to an­chor your price higher such that the step down will be less se­vere than it would be if you en­gaged in free ne­go­ti­a­tions un­en­cum­bered by the bub­bi­li­cious his­tory.

Does this sound vaguely dis­rep­utable to you? Good. This vaguely dis­rep­utable abuse of his­tory is what every em­ployer ask­ing for salary his­tory, salary range, or de­sired salary is do­ing. They are all us­ing your pre­vi­ous anom­alously low salary—a salary which did not re­flect your true mar­ket worth, be­cause you were young or in­ex­pe­ri­enced or un­skilled at ne­go­ti­a­tion or work­ing at a dif­fer­ent firm or in an­other line of work en­tirely—to jus­tify pay­ing you an anom­alously low salary in the fu­ture.

Never give a num­ber. “But Patrick,” you cry. “I don’t want to be dif­fi­cult.” You’re not be­ing dif­fi­cult. You’re not do­ing any­thing im­moral. You’re not be­ing un­pro­fes­sional. They’re busi­ness­men, some­times they don’t have all the in­for­ma­tion they would love to have prior to mak­ing a de­ci­sion. They’ll deal. They al­ready deal with every em­ployee that they’ve ever had who was not a door­mat at ne­go­ti­a­tions, which in­cludes es­sen­tially all of the em­ploy­ees they re­ally value.

Ramit Sethi (more on him later) in­tro­duced me to a con­cept that he calls Competence Triggers: ba­si­cally, if you have to judge some­one’s skill based on a se­ries of brief in­ter­ac­tions, you’re go­ing to pat­tern match their be­hav­ior against other peo­ple who you like.

When peo­ple with hir­ing au­thor­ity think of win­ners, they think of peo­ple like them who live and breathe this busi­ness thing. They ne­go­ti­ate things as a mat­ter of course: that is a ma­jor por­tion of the value they bring to the com­pany. Volunteering a num­ber when asked says the same thing to peo­ple with hir­ing au­thor­ity that flunk­ing FizzBuzz says to an en­gi­neer: this per­son may be a won­der­ful snowflake in other re­gards, but on the thing I care about, they’re cat­a­stroph­i­cally in­com­pe­tent.

It will also cause them to retroac­tively ques­tion com­pe­ten­cies they’d pre­vi­ously cred­ited you with. I have lit­er­ally heard that feed­back, in so many words, from folks with whom I’ve had suc­cess­ful busi­ness deal­ings. (A funny in hind­sight story: I cost my­self five fig­ures with a sin­gle email. The par­tic­u­lars are bor­ing, but suf­fice it to say I fairly re­cently made a wet-be­hind-the-ears-en­gi­neer er­ror in quot­ing a client. He no­ticed. So did my bank state­ment. My bank state­ment kept quiet, but the client opined that it made him think less of me un­til we ac­tu­ally got to work to­gether.)

So any­how, you may well hear rea­sons why you should give a num­ber.

Objection: “I re­ally need a num­ber to move the process for­ward.”

What you should think: “You’re ly­ing to me to at­tempt to get me to com­pro­mise my ne­go­ti­at­ing po­si­tion.”

What you should say: “I’m more con­cerned at the mo­ment with talk­ing to you about dis­cov­er­ing whether we’re a mu­tual fit. If we’re a great fit, then I can be flex­i­ble on the num­bers with you and you can be flex­i­ble on the num­bers with me. If we’re not a great fit, then the num­bers are ul­ti­mately ir­rel­e­vant, be­cause your com­pany only hires A play­ers and I only work at roles I would be an A player at.”

What you should think: “You’re ly­ing to me to at­tempt to get me to com­pro­mise my ne­go­ti­at­ing po­si­tion.”

What you should say: “Give me git ac­cess and I’ll fix it in a jiffy! both peo­ple laugh No, se­ri­ously speak­ing, I’m more con­cerned at the mo­ment with dis­cov­er­ing whether we’re a mu­tual fit… Oh, it’s phys­i­cally im­pos­si­ble? Put in $1 then to get the ball rolling, and we’ll cir­cle back to this later.”

Objection: “We want to fig­ure out whether you’re an ap­pro­pri­ate can­di­date for the po­si­tion.”

What you should think: “You’re ly­ing to me to at­tempt to get me to com­pro­mise my ne­go­ti­at­ing po­si­tion.”

What you should say: “It’s so im­por­tant to me that this is a good mu­tual fit for us. Let’s talk about why I’m a great fit for this po­si­tion: I know you’re con­cerned about $FILL_IN_THE_BLANK. In ad­di­tion to my pre­vi­ous suc­cesses do­ing it, I have some great ideas for what I’d do about that if I was work­ing at your com­pany. Would you like to drill into those or is there an­other job area you’re more con­cerned about to start with?”

The in­ter­net is the bane of my ex­is­tence. Ads, dis­trac­tions, spon­sored con­tent, bad news, bad ideas, more ads, so­cial me­dia, an­ti­so­cial me­dia, even more ads.

Also, I’m a soft­ware de­vel­oper, so the in­ter­net is ba­si­cally in­dis­pens­able for me, a cen­tral pil­lar of my in­come and a con­ve­nient way to com­mu­ni­cate with friends, fam­ily, loved ones, as­so­ci­ates, ac­quain­tances, peo­ple from my sports club, su­per­po­si­tions of all pre­vi­ous groups and en­e­mies alike. And I think my com­pany runs ads, so in a way ads pay for my cloth­ing and food and stuff. So I guess my cur­rent stance to­wards the in­ter­net would be some­what neu­tral-ish, but that may still change.

But I can try to re­duce or at least mod­er­ate some of the neg­a­tive as­pects of the in­ter­net, es­pe­cially those that keep me hooked like some sad ad­dict: so­cial me­dia. I’ve tried com­pletely block­ing it via my net­works’ ad blocker, but the an­i­mal in me cir­cum­vented that block­age by turn­ing off wifi on the cell phone and thus doom scrolling ga­lore on my cell plan. Also, my wife needs some so­cial me­dia for work or re­search (and of course guilty plea­sure) at least some of the time, but she’s as bad in mod­er­a­tion as me. So com­pletely block­ing is not vi­able, but al­low­ing un­re­stricted in­ter­net ac­cess to two rea­son­able adults is some­how also out of the ques­tion.

Until to­day, when Neil Chen posted a sim­ply ge­nius idea to hacker news. Neil de­scribes how a smart plug is used to dy­nam­i­cally rewrite some ublock Origin lists to al­low un­fet­ted ac­cess to all con­tent dis­tract­ing. The idea is fan­tas­tic, but the im­ple­men­ta­tion not prac­ti­cal for my/​our sce­nario, so I’m adapt­ing it here.

I’m al­ready us­ing an net­work wide ad blocker via my gli.net router called “Adblock Home”. And for a smart home with­out in­ter­net ac­cess (see pre­am­ble) I’m us­ing Home Assistant.

So we have:

Surely there must be some way to wire those to­gether hay­wire-ly.

Just like Neil, I want some but­ton to press to al­low for ac­cess to so­cial me­dia, but only for a lim­ited time (say 15 min­utes). After that time has passed, my wife and me must en­dure a cool-down phase un­til we can push the but­ton again (say one hour). So when­ever we push the but­ton, the fil­ters will be dis­abled for 15 sin-filled min­utes. A Zigbee en­abled smart plug is ad­e­quately suited.

Adguard Home is very con­ve­niently in­te­grated into gli.net’s fork/​cus­tomiza­tion of OpenWRT (formerly Lede, for­merly OpenWRT). Frst, we set up the ser­vices we wish to block as cus­tom rules. Sadly we can­not use the built-in ser­vices, be­cause they don’t seem to count as “custom” and thus can­not be tog­gled on and off.

Adguard Home has a fan­tas­tic API, avail­able in OpenAPI yaml. You lo­gin to that API with the nor­mal user and pass­word. But: The routers main in­ter­face some­how by­passes the au­then­ti­ca­tion, which means Adguard Home has no user/​pass­word which we could use for API ac­cess. This fo­rum link ex­plains how one can be added with­out break­ing the ex­ist­ing in­te­gra­tion. Basically, we have to add them by hand to the /etc/Adguard/config.yaml file. Change:

This pass­word is the bcrypt hash of ad­min, but of course thats not the pass­word I’m ac­tu­ally us­ing. Use cy­berchef to gen­er­ate the hash.

Home Assistant comes with a func­tional, but some­what re­duced in­te­gra­tion. It can how­ever do all we need.

Among the switches it ex­poses is “Filtering”, which en­ables or dis­ables ap­pli­ca­tion of cus­tom fil­ter rules. We can flick this switch via au­toma­tion.

After some trial and er­ror, I’ve ar­rived at this au­toma­tion, which as of now seems to work just fine and just like I in­tended.

So wait, can’t I still just dis­able wifi to con­tinue the in­ces­sant pol­lu­tion of my fee­ble brain with cat videos?

Well, yes. But this helps me ex­er­cise mod­er­a­tion, and like with any poi­son, so­cial me­dia is tol­er­a­ble in small doses.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the “decline of the lit­er­ary (straight) (white) male.” The mar­ginal ben­e­fit pro­vided by an ad­di­tional take on this topic, some clever new an­gle walk­ing the tightrope be­tween edgy and po­lit­i­cally cor­rect, is rapidly ap­proach­ing zero.

The prob­lem with these ar­ti­cles—and the dis­course as a whole—is that none of them go far enough. There is an im­pass­able chasm be­tween the star­dom of Mailer, Updike, McCarthy, DFW, Franzen, etc and who­ever is get­ting fel­low­ships and is pub­lished in The New Yorker or Paris Review to­day. Yet the chief com­plaint from ad­vo­cates for the lit­er­ary men is that they are un­fairly de­nied these fel­low­ships and pub­li­ca­tions. I’m sure they’re be­ing dis­crim­i­nated against, but you’re just re­plac­ing one group of peo­ple you’ve never heard of, with a dif­fer­ent group of peo­ple you’ve never heard of with dif­fer­ent sex or­gans.

This may well be a Title VII prob­lem, but there’s a bait-and-switch hap­pen­ing: the rhetor­i­cal ap­peal of the con­ver­sa­tion about lit­er­ary men de­pends on the fall-off from The Greats—the jux­ta­po­si­tion be­tween their suc­cess and the bar­ren op­por­tu­ni­ties for lit­er­ary men to­day. Yet no one seems will­ing to con­tend with the fact that this is not just an is­sue for lit­er­ary men, it’s an is­sue for every­one. What non-iden­tity qual­ity do The Greats have in com­mon that vir­tu­ally all young con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary fic­tion writ­ers (Rooney aside), don’t? It’s ob­vi­ous—peo­ple knew about them and bought their books.

The 21st cen­tury col­lapse in American lit­er­ary fic­tion’s cul­tural im­pact, mea­sured by com­mer­cial sales and the ca­pac­ity to pro­duce well-known great writ­ers, stems less from iden­tity pol­i­tics or smart­phones than from a com­bined sup­ply shock (the shrink­ing mag­a­zine or acad­e­mia pipeline) and de­mand shock (the move away from writ­ing books that ap­peal to nor­mal read­ers in or­der to seek pres­tige in­side the world of lit-fic­tion)

To start, take a look at Publisher Weekly’s “list of best-sell­ing nov­els of 1962:”

The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris WestRaise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour-An Introduction by J. D. Salinger

It feels a lit­tle cruel to rub it in, but for com­par­ison’s sake here’s 2023:

It Ends with Us by Colleen HooverIt Starts with Us by Colleen HooverDog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea by Dav Pilkey

* Portnoy’s Complaint was the best-sell­ing book of 1969

* James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (861 pages) was the best-sell­ing book of 1951

* Lolita made it to #3 in 1958 and held on at #8 in 1959 (the #1 spot in 1958 be­longed to Doctor Zhivago)

* Ragtime was the best-sell­ing book of 1974

* The Corrections — #5 in 2001 — was the most re­cent work of lit­er­ary fic­tion to make the yearly top ten best-sell­ers

* No work of lit­er­ary fic­tion has been on Publisher’s Weekly’s yearly top ten best-sell­ing list since 2001

* Percival Everett’s James is the most re­cent work of lit­er­ary fic­tion to make the New York Times’s weekly best­seller list — it was the best-sell­ing book in the last week of 2024

* Before James, the most re­cent one was Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway for one week in October 2021

In the mad rush for sta­bil­ity among a shrink­ing pool of re­sources (financial and cul­tural), au­thors and dis­course-mak­ers seem to have fallen into malaise bick­er­ing about how these re­sources should be di­vided up in­stead of why the pool is shrink­ing. It does­n’t mat­ter that no white man born af­ter 1984 has been pub­lished by The New Yorker, be­cause I hon­estly doubt any se­ri­ous reader of fic­tion could eas­ily bring to mind a short story by any younger writer in The New Yorker at all. The gap be­tween now and The Greats mat­ters for all writ­ers, not just men. So the real prob­lem is lit­er­ary fic­tion’s whole­sale de­cline, not how the ever-smaller pie gets sliced up.

After read­ing some ar­ti­cles on the de­cline of American lit­er­ary fic­tion, I came away with the sense that no one is par­tic­u­larly in­ter­ested in why lit­er­ary fic­tion’s rel­e­vance has plum­meted, in­stead the au­thors of these pieces are in­tent on prov­ing only whether or not salient is­sues like smart­phones, dis­crim­i­na­tion, or woke pub­lish­ers might have some­thing to do with it. But while it’s not dif­fi­cult to cob­ble to­gether a story about why these is­sues might have had some ef­fect, no one has both­ered to ask whether these are re­ally the dri­vers—if they drive the dis­course, surely they’re the ac­tual causes right?

Let’s look at two rep­re­sen­ta­tive ar­ti­cles that touch on the gen­eral de­cline of lit­er­ary fic­tion: Will Blythe’s The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction from 2023 and ARX-Han’s more re­cent The de­cline of lit­er­ary fic­tion and the prin­ci­pal-agent prob­lem in mod­ern pub­lish­ing.

Han has a com­pelling the­sis that fits in along­side the re­cent com­plaints about anti-male dis­crim­i­na­tion in pub­lish­ing:

“Here’s one hy­poth­e­sis be­hind the de­cline in mod­ern lit­er­ary fic­tion: I be­lieve that the lit­er­ary mar­ket has be­come less ef­fi­cient be­cause of an in­creased de­gree of prin­ci­pal-agent con­flict be­tween ed­i­tors and their pub­lish­ing houses. I sus­pect that the rea­son for this in­creased prin­ci­pal-agent con­flict is in­creased sta­tus com­pe­ti­tion be­tween lit­er­ary ed­i­tors dri­ven by the cul­ture war. To me, it seems like ed­i­tors are com­pet­ing on the axis of moral sta­tus.The over­rid­ing im­per­a­tive be­hind “elevating di­verse voices” in pub­lish­ing is ac­tu­ally an axis of moral com­pe­ti­tion be­tween lit­er­ary ed­i­tors.”

It’s quite clever: ed­i­tors are com­pet­ing on sta­tus and cor­rectly (from their per­spec­tive) op­ti­mize for di­ver­sity in­stead of qual­ity. This is an in­ter­est­ing the­ory, but it’s not a great ex­pla­na­tion for the gen­eral de­cline in lit­er­ary fic­tion’s qual­ity, sales, and cul­tural cap­i­tal for a fairly ob­vi­ous rea­son—the tim­ing does­n’t work.

It be­gan, re­ally, in 2010, 2012,” the award-win­ning au­thor Lionel Shriver, best known for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, told The Free Press.”

This is sim­ply too late in time to sat­is­fac­to­rily ex­plain the de­cline of lit­er­ary fic­tion; maybe it can speak to some of the qual­ity and pop­u­lar­ity de­cline post-2010, but a full ex­pla­na­tion should be able to ex­plain a steady de­cline in con­sumer pop­u­lar­ity be­gin­ning in the 1980s & 90s un­til al­most com­plete col­lapse in the early 2000s. Nothing about Han’s the­ory can ex­plain, for ex­am­ple, why no work of lit­er­ary fic­tion has been a yearly best-seller since 2001.

I’m also not fully con­vinced by the struc­ture he sets up. I agree that there is a di­ver­gence be­tween sales and ed­i­tor sta­tus op­ti­miza­tion, but I’m not sure why the mode of op­ti­miza­tion should be moral sta­tus. Another mode of op­ti­miza­tion that is or­thog­o­nal to mon­e­tary suc­cess is crit­i­cal ac­claim — if the book you edited or pub­lished won a Pulitzer/Booker it feels in­tu­itively that you’ve out-sta­tused some other pub­lish­er’s ac­crued di­ver­sity/​iden­tity sta­tus. Of course it’s much eas­ier to ac­crue sta­tus by way of the ‘moral sta­tus’ Han talks about, but this cuts both ways be­cause this sort of sta­tus that is easy to ac­quire won’t be worth as much as ‘connection to lit­er­ary pres­tige’ which is much harder to get. And there is of course an­other re­lated prin­ci­pal-agent prob­lem at work here with au­thors them­selves—lit­er­ary fic­tion prob­a­bly be­ing unique among sub­gen­res in that it feels like au­thors value awards and the opin­ions of crit­ics far more than sales. More on that later.

No one can deny that pub­lish­ing has ‘gone woke,’ but this alone is in­suf­fi­cient to ex­plain lit­er­ary fic­tion’s nose­dive.

In the 2023 Esquire ar­ti­cle, The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction, Will Blythe of­fers up an­other ex­pla­na­tion:

“In the past twenty-five or so years, the mag­a­zine in­dus­try has shrunk in the midst of this “dataism,” par­tic­u­larly in its ren­di­tion of lit­er­ary fic­tion. Three years ago, Adrienne LaFrance, ex­ec­u­tive ed­i­tor of The Atlantic, de­cided to help de­vise an on­line des­ti­na­tion for such fic­tion, short sto­ries in par­tic­u­lar, be­gin­ning with one by Lauren Groff. “The thin­ning of print mag­a­zines this cen­tury,” she writes, “meant a culling of fic­tion.” The in­ter­net, in her es­ti­ma­tion (and mine), “makes fairly ef­fi­cient work of splin­ter­ing at­ten­tion and de­vour­ing time.” As a re­sult, she con­cludes that lit­er­ary read­ing is “far too eas­ily set aside.”

Why did mag­a­zines go un­der, why does no one read lit­er­ary fic­tion any­more? “The in­ter­net,” Blythe sternly replies.

People don’t read books or short sto­ries in mag­a­zines any­more be­cause they’re too busy scrolling? There’s data on this: ac­cord­ing to the National Endowment of the Arts, the num­ber of Americans who “read lit­er­a­ture” has fallen from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022. I’m not even go­ing to bother pulling data on the per­cent of time peo­ple spend on their phones or on the in­ter­net. So the in­ter­net means peo­ple spend less time read­ing books and (presumably) less time read­ing lit­er­ary fic­tion in par­tic­u­lar be­cause it’s weighty, bor­ing, dense, etc. There are two prob­lems with this the­ory: one is that the facts are wrong — the ac­tual size of the fic­tion read­ing pop­u­la­tion has not shrunk a mean­ing­ful amount (population growth), and the sec­ond is that even if the facts were right, it could­n’t be cor­rect: in 1955, the num­ber of Americans who even read one book a year (39%) was lower than it is to­day (53%). And the 1950s and 1960s were sup­pos­edly the golden-age of American fic­tion. What’s ac­tu­ally go­ing on?

It’s ob­vi­ous that the “distraction” an­gle is un­ten­able. It has­n’t di­rectly im­pacted the num­ber of read­ers enough to mat­ter. Still there are other an­gles here, what about taste? Blythe’s piece can also be read as say­ing that phones, the in­ter­net, short-form con­tent, etc have changed the way peo­ple con­sume books such that lit­er­ary fic­tion is out and poorly writ­ten genre-fic­tion and steamy ro­mance are in.

On face, this is a far more com­pelling the­ory: the fic­tion mar­ket is dom­i­nated by genre fic­tion, ro­mance, and James Patterson. Literary fic­tion makes up some­thing like 2% of the mar­ket. People are still read­ing books, they’re just read­ing worse books. Why? Ensloppification or some­thing. We’ve ex­plained the fall of lit­er­ary fic­tion and it’s still the com­put­er’s fault.

But there is some data that fits very strangely into this pic­ture. For one, peo­ple still read plenty of lit­er­ary fic­tion, what they don’t read is con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary fic­tion. Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thou­sands of copies every year, more than even big hits in con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary fic­tion. And look at any sur­vey of con­tem­po­rary au­di­ences’ fa­vorite books. Plenty of lit­er­ary fic­tion there. So I think there’s a strong enough war­rant here that the ‘taste-change’ hy­poth­e­sis can’t be right ei­ther — un­less the in­ter­net made peo­ple’s tastes mag­i­cally shift away from con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary fic­tion but not clas­sics.

To un­der­stand what’s hap­pened to lit­er­ary fic­tion, then, per­haps it’s worth try­ing to dis­en­tan­gle two tightly linked prob­lems: the com­mer­cial fail­ure of lit­er­ary fic­tion and the crit­i­cal fail­ure — the lack of a young Great writer. By now it’s ob­vi­ous that the for­mer prob­lem ex­ists, but you might be skep­ti­cal of the lat­ter.

It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” be­cause the con­cept trades on a the­ory of aes­thet­ics that is con­tro­ver­sial when spelled out (aesthetic value re­al­ism; maybe even a kind of Platonism about beauty) and dif­fi­cult to de­fend, but which we all nev­er­the­less sub­scribe to in­tu­itively.

Some books widely praised as clas­sics and mas­ter­pieces in their time are for­got­ten soon af­ter. Many books that a lot of peo­ple like are sim­ply not any good. But far rarer than these cases are books that are for­got­ten in their time and “discovered” as mas­ter­pieces. For the last twenty years American lit­er­ary cul­ture has been un­able to pro­duce a writer we can de­scribe as great with­out at least feel­ing a tinge of em­bar­rass­ment about. We should be wor­ried.

I first got the sense that some­thing had gone wrong when, in high-school English class, we read One Hundred Years of Solitude fol­lowed by Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award win­ning Salvage the Bones. It’s not that Salvage the Bones was not a ser­vice­able book: well-plot­ted, be­liev­able char­ac­ters, etc, but it was im­pos­si­ble to not deny that these two books could even be put on the same level.

“What about x, y, z? They’re re­ally push­ing the bound­aries of fic­tion as a medium.” I don’t want to be mean, but I doubt it. At this mo­ment, there are not even any fa­mous lit­er­ary fic­tion writ­ers (much less ge­niuses) in the United States of America un­der the age of 65. If we can ar­gue about it, you’re wrong. This was not the case in 2000, 1990, 1980, 1970, 1960, etc. Before we even get to the prob­lem of sales, we need to know what’s gone wrong with the tal­ent pipeline.

Blythe is right about one thing—the in­ter­net killed mag­a­zines, not be­cause peo­ple’s brains turned to mush, but be­cause of the loss of ad­ver­tise­ment rev­enue. U. S. con­sumer-mag­a­zine ad spend al­most halved from 2004 to 2024 as brands chased cheaper, bet­ter-tar­geted im­pres­sions on Google and Facebook. It was those mag­a­zines that did­n’t rely pri­mar­ily on ad­ver­tis­ing rev­enue which sur­vived and are thriv­ing to­day. The New Yorker, for ex­am­ple, is still prof­itable and cur­rently has a paid cir­cu­la­tion of 1.3 mil­lion, more than dou­ble what it had in the hey­days of the 1950s and 1960s.

Still, the mag­a­zines that sur­vived could no longer af­ford to give as much space to short sto­ries or com­pen­sate their writ­ers well — as crazy as it sounds it was pos­si­ble to make a liv­ing writ­ing short sto­ries and pub­lish­ing them in pe­ri­od­i­cals both in pulp pub­li­ca­tions and more pres­ti­gious mag­a­zines.

The col­lapse of the mag­a­zine ecosys­tem is im­por­tant not be­cause it meant less peo­ple were read­ing lit­er­ary fic­tion, but be­cause it thinned the tal­ent pipeline — there were less op­por­tu­ni­ties to get pub­lished and less money for you if you did.

But the mag­a­zine-side is only part of the pic­ture, the other prob­lem was in acad­e­mia. From US Doctorates in the 20th Century:

“Earning a doc­tor­ate dur­ing the first 70 years of the 20th cen­tury typ­i­cally as­sured the grad­u­ate of a po­si­tion in acad­eme…Hu­man­i­ties Ph. D.s had the high­est rate of aca­d­e­mic em­ploy­ment—83 per­cent in 1995–99—but lower than the 94 per­cent level in 1970–74.”

Since a peak in open po­si­tions in 1984, the num­ber of new English teach­ing po­si­tions has plum­meted while the num­ber of PHDs has held steady.

The same prob­lem holds true for cre­ative writ­ing: in 2016 there were 3,000 MFA grad­u­ates and 119 tenure-track po­si­tions.

Writers can no longer make a good liv­ing writ­ing free­lance for mag­a­zines, and they’re un­likely to find so­lace in the aca­d­e­mic job mar­ket ei­ther. Worse — even if they do get cre­den­tials and man­age to find a pub­lisher, most likely their book will have mea­ger sales of a cou­ple thou­sand copies. If they want to write and make a de­cent amount of money, where can they go?

From a fi­nan­cial per­spec­tive then, one at­trac­tor away from the pipeline into writ­ing lit­er­ary fic­tion comes from the rise of pres­tige-tele­vi­sion over the last sev­eral decades. The showrun­ners of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and True Detective all have cre­ative-writ­ing MFAs. Before the ad­vent of pres­tige TV and the de­cline of mag­a­zines and acad­e­mia, there was lit­tle risk that writ­ers of lit­er­ary fic­tion would turn from writ­ing nov­els to the screen.

The tal­ent pipeline for lit­er­ary fic­tion has shrunk con­sid­er­ably over the past sev­eral decades. Anyone with a shred of care for fi­nan­cial suc­cess has es­sen­tially been fil­tered out. And even if lit­er­ary fic­tion started to sell again this would still largely be true — Writing a book has al­ways been a lot­tery ticket, even when the mar­ket was in a bet­ter con­di­tion — a small per­cent­age of books drive al­most all of the sales.

Imagine the pool of po­ten­tial writ­ers, peo­ple who, if they had the op­por­tu­nity, would spend their en­tire lives writ­ing lit­er­ary fic­tion and a few of them even hav­ing the in­nate tal­ent and ca­pac­ity to go on and be­come “Great” writ­ers af­ter many years at work. The re­cent loss of two clear path­ways to live such a life has shrunk this pool dras­ti­cally. No won­der then that we haven’t seen any ge­nius fic­tion writ­ers in quite some time.

But this is only half the prob­lem. The pub­lic used to gob­ble up lit­er­ary fic­tion, and not just ground­break­ing mas­ter­pieces: fic­tion that was just good. John O’Hara was a good writer. No one to­day re­mem­bers his book Elizabeth Appleton, but it was the fifth best-sell­ing book of the year in 1963. No one has ever called Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools a mas­ter­piece (she her­self even­tu­ally dis­missed it as ‘unwieldy’ and ‘enormous’), but it was the best-sell­ing book of 1962. And so on with many of the lesser nov­els of the Greats and many mid­dling works of lit­er­ary fic­tion by au­thors that have been for­got­ten to­day. But from the 1970s on­ward, fewer and fewer works made it onto the best-sell­ers lists. Why is this no longer the case?

It can’t be be­cause book read­ers have dras­ti­cally changed their pref­er­ences: they still like to read lit­er­ary fic­tion (including plenty of non clas­sics/​mas­ter­pieces — A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Outsiders, A Secret History, Rebecca, etc all sell very well to this day) and only seem to have a prob­lem with con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary fic­tion.

Something about lit­er­ary fic­tion has changed in re­cent years that has put it off to mass au­di­ences. Han lo­cates the change in “wokeness,” but the tim­ing does­n’t work — this shift was al­ready in full swing be­fore the 2010s when “woke” be­came a salient is­sue.

On her ex­cel­lent blog, Naomi Kanakia notes the fol­low­ing:

Our lit­er­ary cul­ture has lost faith in ‘the gen­eral read­er’

Since start­ing this newslet­ter, I have be­come very fa­mil­iar with…in­tel­li­gent peo­ple who read books and are in­ter­ested in lit­er­a­ture, but are not con­nected to lit-world dis­course. However, I find that, in prac­tice, it is very dif­fi­cult to con­vince the lit­er­ary world that folks like [this] ac­tu­ally ex­ist. They be­lieve read­ers ex­ist, but they tend to think most read­ers are stu­pid and don’t like to read smart books. They think that read­ers of smart books are an en­dan­gered species, and that a crit­ic’s pri­mary role is to con­vince the read­ers of dumb books to read smart books in­stead.But, re­cently, lit­er­ary peo­ple have started to lose faith even in this rather-con­de­scend­ing goal. Nowadays, lit­er­ary peo­ple have started to con­cep­tu­al­ize read­ing it­self as be­ing an en­dan­gered ac­tiv­ity—they be­lieve that the gen­eral pub­lic’s ac­tual abil­ity to read has some­how been di­min­ished by the rise of smart­phones.

The key here is the fol­low­ing thought: “it is very dif­fi­cult to con­vince the reader that [intelligent peo­ple who read books and are in­ter­ested in lit­er­a­ture, but are not con­nected to lit-world dis­course] ac­tu­ally ex­ist.”

The prin­ci­pal rea­son self-con­scious con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary fic­tion sells no books is be­cause it’s all in­sider-base­ball so to speak. There’s noth­ing in most of these books for the gen­eral reader. The books are writ­ten for the crit­ics. It’s easy to see how a vi­cious cy­cle could have arisen from the pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with sta­tus, not sales:

Critics feel the need to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves, both from other crit­ics and from pop­u­lar taste so they come up with in­creas­ingly baroque cri­te­ria to judge these book­sRead­ers are un­der­stand­ably alien­ated when they pick up new books; to­tal sales dropThe drop in lit­er­ary fic­tion sales in­creases the al­lure of 1)

And so on in a cir­cle un­til we’ve ar­rived at a place where lit­er­ary fic­tion is 2% of the fic­tion mar­ket.

How ex­actly did this cy­cle start? I think there’s rea­son to be­lieve it be­gan in the 1970s. Here’s one hy­poth­e­sis:

Consider the case of Philip Roth. Goodbye, Columbus was a best-seller and turned into a movie. Portnoy’s Complaint sold half a mil­lion copies and was the best-sell­ing book of 1969. But no Roth novel in the 1970s ap­peared on any best-sell­ers list, and con­sid­er­ing the brusque ex­per­i­men­ta­tion of the nov­els in ques­tion: The Breast, My Life as a Man, and The Ghost-Writer, this is no great sur­prise. And yet he re­ceived crit­i­cal ac­claim dur­ing the decade: The Ghost Writer was se­lected by the Pulitzer Committee in 1980 (though over­ruled by the board which se­lected The Executioner’s Song in­stead) and was a fi­nal­ist for the National Book Award, The Professor of Desire was nom­i­nated for the Critics Circle Award, and all of these books were heav­ily praised by news­pa­per and mag­a­zine re­view­ers.

Who else was win­ning awards at this time? With Gravity’s Rainbow’s National Book Award in 1974 (and re­fused Pulitzer) it was in­creas­ingly post­mod­ern au­thors like Pynchon, Barth, and Gaddis, none of whom ever sold a mean­ing­ful num­ber of books. Their rise sig­naled the start of a com­plete de­cou­pling of sales and crit­i­cal taste. Authors who con­sciously shunned the ‘middlebrow’ mass au­di­ences of mid-cen­tury America were re­warded by the crit­ics. And au­thors like Roth, who were in cease­less pur­suit of lit­er­ary sta­tus, read­ily changed their style to ac­com­mo­date this new en­vi­ron­ment.

Of course the trends changed and so af­ter post­mod­ernism a kind of MFA min­i­mal­ism came to dom­i­nate lit­er­ary fic­tion, a style whose ef­fects are still read­ily pre­sent in any con­tem­po­rary works one might pick up to­day. But the broader point is that be­gin­ning in the 1970s, au­thors were will­ing to op­ti­mize for crit­i­cal praise at the ex­pense of sales to a de­gree they had not been be­fore.

So from the 1970s on­ward, lit­er­ary fic­tion was seen less and less on the best-sell­ers list, though the later col­lapse of the tal­ent pipeline be­gin­ning in the 1980s and 1990s with the slow­ing aca­d­e­mic job mar­ket and the wide­spread fail­ure of print mag­a­zines, is what fi­nally killed off its com­mer­cial prospects.

There are still some im­por­tant open ques­tions: the ex­act role of the crit­ics in mov­ing au­thors away from pop­u­lar taste, the in­volve­ment of pub­lish­ers, and the saliency of this es­say for non-US au­thors and mar­kets (the case of Sally Rooney is quite in­ter­est­ing). But I will con­clude this es­say here with some part­ing words.

I think the most im­por­tant con­clu­sion is that all of this is ac­tu­ally good news for as­pir­ing writ­ers: it’s not that the philis­tine dopamine-ad­dled masses will never be ca­pa­ble of giv­ing you the praise you de­serve, it’s just that (1) ba­si­cally no one is writ­ing lit­er­ary fic­tion and (2) the pre­sent-day norms of lit­er­ary fic­tion mean that the gen­eral reader will never like any­one who is. Both of these prob­lems are eas­ier to fix than dras­ti­cally chang­ing the read­ing tastes of the en­tire pop­u­la­tion. But how will they be fixed? I’m not sure.

I don’t think mag­a­zines with short sto­ries are ever com­ing back. The sit­u­a­tion in acad­e­mia will likely not im­prove. But I do sus­pect Substack will play a role in broad­en­ing norms and mak­ing it eas­ier to write lit­er­ary fic­tion. I think the ad­vent of the in­ter­net, though it killed the mag­a­zines, will some­day be seen as a god­send for writ­ing. Although on the topic of tech­nol­ogy, if LLMs or AI have any part to play in this story, it will likely not be a good one. But know­ing that the fate of lit­er­a­ture is still in the hands of writ­ers, I’m op­ti­mistic.

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Chris Lattner men­tioned that Python can ac­tu­ally call Mojo code now. I love this idea (!) as I’m def­i­nitely in the mar­ket for a sim­ple com­piled lan­guage that can of­fer Python some re­ally fast func­tions. So I gave it a quick spin

The setup is much sim­pler than I re­mem­ber it, you can use uv for it now.

After that you can de­clare a .mojo file that looks like this:

# mo­jo_­mod­ule.mojo

from python im­port PythonObject

from python.bind­ings im­port PythonModuleBuilder

im­port math

from os im­port abort

@export

fn PyInit_mojo_module() -> PythonObject:

try:

var m = PythonModuleBuilder(“mojo_module”)

m.de­f_­func­tion[fac­to­r­ial](“fac­to­r­ial”, doc­string=“Com­pute n!“)

re­turn m.fi­nal­ize()

ex­cept e:

re­turn abort[PythonOb­ject](String(“er­ror cre­at­ing Python Mojo mod­ule:”, e))

fn fac­to­r­ial(py_obj: PythonObject) raises -> PythonObject:

# Raises an ex­cep­tion if `py_obj` is not con­vert­ible to a Mojo `Int`.

var n = Int(py_obj)

var re­sult = 1

for i in range(1, n + 1):

re­sult *= i

re­turn re­sult

And you can then load it from Python via:

# main.py

im­port max.mojo.im­porter

im­port os

im­port sys

im­port time

im­port math

sys.path.in­sert(0, “”)

im­port mo­jo_­mod­ule

start = time.time()

print(mo­jo_­mod­ule.fac­to­r­ial(10))

end = time.time()

print(f”Time taken: {end - start} sec­onds for mojo”)

start = time.time()

print(math.fac­to­r­ial(10))

end = time.time()

print(f”Time taken: {end - start} sec­onds for python”)

This was the out­put:

3628800

Time taken: 3.0279159545898438e-05 sec­onds for mojo

3628800

Time taken: 5.0067901611328125e-06 sec­onds for python

This all works, but at the time of mak­ing this blog­post I was able to spot some rough edges. If I in­crease the fac­to­r­ial num­ber to 100 then the out­put changes.

0

Time taken: 2.7894973754882812e-05 sec­onds for mojo

188267717688892609974376770249160085759540364871492425887598231508353156331613598866882932889495923133646405445930057740630161919341380597818883457558547055524326375565007131770880000000000000000000000000000000

Time taken: 9.298324584960938e-06 sec­onds for python

This is prob­a­bly be­cause of some over­flow is­sues on the mod­u­lar side. The docs men­tion that this whole stack is pretty early, and I guess this is a sign of that.

Given that the over­flow is prob­a­bly the is­sue here, I fig­ured I’d run one ex­tra ex­am­ple just to see if we could mea­sure a speed in­crease. So I went with a naive prime num­ber count­ing ex­am­ple. This is the mojo code:

from python im­port PythonObject

from python.bind­ings im­port PythonModuleBuilder

im­port math

from os im­port abort

@export

fn PyInit_mojo_module() -> PythonObject:

try:

var m = PythonModuleBuilder(“mojo_module”)

m.de­f_­func­tion[coun­t_primes](“coun­t_primes”, doc­string=“Count primes up to n”)

re­turn m.fi­nal­ize()

ex­cept e:

re­turn abort[PythonOb­ject](String(“er­ror cre­at­ing Python Mojo mod­ule:”, e))

fn coun­t_primes(py_obj: PythonObject) raises -> PythonObject:

var n = Int(py_obj)

var count: Int = 0

for i in range(2, n + 1):

var is_prime: Bool = True

for j in range(2, i):

if i % j == 0:

is_prime = False

break

if is_prime:

count += 1

re­turn count

This is the Python code, note that I also added a numpy im­ple­men­ta­tion for com­par­i­son.

im­port numpy as np

im­port max.mojo.im­porter

im­port os

im­port sys

im­port time

im­port math

sys.path.in­sert(0, “”)

im­port mo­jo_­mod­ule

def coun­t_primes(n):

count = 0

for i in range(2, n + 1):

is_prime = True

for j in range(2, i):

if i % j == 0:

is_prime = False

break

if is_prime:

count += 1

re­turn count

def coun­t_primes_numpy(n):

if n < 2:

re­turn 0

can­di­dates = np.arange(2, n + 1)

Three years af­ter con­struc­tion be­gan, it’s time to dump dirt on the pro­ject. Specifically, 6,000 cu­bic yards of a “super” soil fol­lowed by the plant­ing of 5,000 na­tive flora. I’m talk­ing about the world’s largest wildlife cross­ing, which has reached an­other con­struc­tion mile­stone as the bridge nears com­ple­tion.

This pre­pared soil is the be­gin­ning of the end of con­struc­tion for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which broke ground on Earth Day in 2022. Located in Agoura Hills, California, the nearly one-acre over­pass stretches over a 10-lane sec­tion of U. S. 101.

The phys­i­cal bridge struc­ture is es­sen­tially com­plete, hav­ing re­quired 26 mil­lion pounds of con­crete, Beth Pratt of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) told KCAL. The NWF Regional Executive Director added, “We just put the soil on top, and then we start bury­ing util­ity lines and ex­tend it over the ac­cess road.”

Multiple lay­ers of soil will be needed to cre­ate a wildlife habi­tat on the over­pass, and the soil ap­pli­ca­tion alone will take sev­eral weeks. However, when the Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is done, the bridge will re­con­nect the bi­sected ar­eas of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. With more than 150,000 acres, SMMNRA is the coun­try’s largest ur­ban na­tional park. But the free­ways have long iso­lated the lo­cal fauna, from but­ter­flies and cot­ton­tails to bob­cats and moun­tain li­ons.

According to the pro­ject, as far back as the 1980s, re­searchers iden­ti­fied the Liberty Canyon area as a choke point for wildlife. However, it was­n’t un­til the National Park Service be­gan a decades-long study of the re­gion’s moun­tain lion pop­u­la­tion that the 101 free­way was deemed “the most sig­nif­i­cant bar­rier to the eco­log­i­cal health of the re­gion.”

More than 300,000 ve­hi­cles travel along U. S. 101 daily. That’s enough traf­fic to give a dri­ver anx­i­ety—try be­ing a lo­cal crit­ter hav­ing to dart across the road just to find din­ner.

P-22, ar­guably the most fa­mous moun­tain lion in and out­side of Hollywood, sur­prised every­one by cross­ing free­ways on his own. He even­tu­ally be­came the poster cat for the “Save L. A. cougars” cam­paign. Unfortunately, he was eu­th­a­nized in late 2022 af­ter be­ing found with se­vere in­juries, likely due to a ve­hi­cle col­li­sion, and a myr­iad of other health is­sues.

Mountain li­ons are the main con­ser­va­tion fo­cus of this wildlife bridge. The big cats are ter­ri­to­r­ial, and be­ing locked in by free­ways lim­its their roam­ing range and bio­di­ver­sity. Without the cross­ing to ex­pand their habi­tat, SoCal cougars could be ex­tinct within 50 years. They also con­tinue to be killed by ve­hi­cles.

“In the Liberty Canyon area where we’re putting the cross­ing, within the last four years, we’ve had four moun­tain li­ons killed just in that gen­eral area,” Pratt said.

Not just pro­vid­ing ac­cess to more sources of food, shel­ter, and mates, but the bridge would also of­fer an es­cape route from wild­fires and other dis­as­ters. The Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is ex­pected to reach com­ple­tion next year.

This is an im­ple­men­ta­tion of the clas­sic 2048 game in your ter­mi­nal:

Share your game state with friends by just send­ing them a num­ber!

If the $STATE env vari­able is­n’t set, it gen­er­ates a fresh ran­dom seed.

Otherwise the board state and all fu­ture spawned cells will be de­ter­min­is­tic.

I wrote a small script that runs in the back­ground, polling for the state of an $8 smart plug.

It’s got a switch on the side to man­u­ally tog­gle the switch on and off. It con­nects to WiFi, so you can read the state of the plug via API.

When you turn the switch on, the script up­dates /etc/hosts to ef­fec­tively block web­sites of your choos­ing:

127.0.0.1 www.twit­ter.com

127.0.0.1 x.com

127.0.0.1 in­sta­gram.com

127.0.0.1 youtube.com

127.0.0.1 red­dit.com

You can plug the switch into any out­let, ide­ally one far away from you. Now, when­ever I want to visit a web­site in my block­list, I have to phys­i­cally get up and turn off the switch. Alternatively, I could just man­u­ally edit /etc/hosts, but this ad­di­tional step adds just enough fric­tion to make me re­con­sider re­flex­ively dis­tract­ing my­self.