Good Tokens 2025-10-01
Best enjoyed this week in a sunny corner of a park
Worth your time
If you’ve ever wanted to buy a life sized dinosaur, now is your chance. Someday my son is going to find out I had this opportunity and didn’t take it and will never look at me the same way again.
The Quiet Ones by Nikunj Kothari. An ode to the people that do the little things to make a company or a team effective.
Illiteracy is a policy choice. We don’t talk about Mississippi’s education system often enough (although careful readers of Good Tokens will recognize this from a previous edition). Every single state should be studying their approach to literacy. See also the Sold a Story .
Altoids by the fistful. Via my friend Daniel.
I now realize that everything I lorded over other people—all the things I gatekept without consciously understanding that this was what I was doing—I didn’t need to do that. It really didn’t help anything. For some number of people who interacted with me, I was the problem. I could’ve been more tolerant or forgiving, I could’ve said “let’s find out together,” I could’ve let other people have the fun once in a while.
"The devil’s oldest strategy is, of course, promising godlike creation without godlike effort." Slop is a choice.
Musings
Let’s see if I can land the plane on this one. I’m surprised that there isn’t more nostalgic fiction about growing up in evangelical Christian circles. There’s satirical stuff like Saved but nothing that I’m aware of like The Big Sick that both pokes fun at being a child of immigrants while also on some level clearly feeling affection for it. Is this out there and I just don’t know about it?
Are we at the point where “yes, and…” is overrated? If not, how long until we get there?
Something I struggled with this week: for someone like you and me, in 2025, what does it mean to live a good life? At 19, it was easier for me to articulate an answer to this question I actually believed than it is now in many ways. If you feel like you have a good answer to this, consider this me humbly requesting that you write it and share it.
Things I learned
Apparently Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake”, according to a recent Rest Is History Bonus episode. I’m a sucker for things we think that aren’t actually so.
China installed more industrial robots last year than the rest of the world combined. This is one of those stats that a 17 year old is going to be citing in an AP History Exam in 2084 about why China won the war for Taiwan.
Badgers air out their beds to keep them clean, via Secrets of the Forest.
“You are going to continue sucking for the rest of your career.” A call from Nerajno to embrace learning.
LLM corner
Episode 2 of Dangerously Skip Permissions. Mark your calendars. Tell your friends. Tell people you don’t even like.
A list of ways to run more than one Claude Code instance at once. I was hoping to build in this space but I may be too late.
The future is compounding teams
Simon Willison on designing agents loops.
What does a UI look like that all users are able to edit? What primitives are needed to build it?
Fuzzy compilers in less than 30 seconds.
Making a note to try out Microsoft’s amplifier.
Human / AI synergy and having a theory of mind.