Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like by Ellie

Japan’s conditions create a map of where the U.S. is heading unless significant structural changes occur. We’re seeing intensified overwork culture in a stagnant job market, parasocial intimacy becoming a substitute for human connection, and convenience replacing domestic life. There is slow collapse of dating, shrinking fertility rates, and a pattern of young adults dropping out of social life under economic pressures.

Similar pressures exist in India as well, where all you’re doing is sleeping, getting up, going to work, coming back, sleeping and so on.

Finland is better at this. For now.

Memberships Year Seven, Nuclear Bombs, Solar Power — Roden Newsletter Archive by Craig Mod

Laptops kinda ruined this. I find it hard to focus on my laptop, the wondermachine it now is. So: I’m typing this on my “modern” word processor — the cheapest iPad Mini I could find, stripped of anything fun, with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, in Obsidian. It’s been working pretty well for me. iPadOS is so bad (at this point they’d need to do a full reset to make it feel whole and / or interesting) that it makes doing any kind of “fluid computing” impossible. So it’s best to just stay in Obsidian and write.

I was thinking about this just yesterday as I was writing the last nordletter on my Mac. For the past month I had carried just my iPad and the Logi keyboard with me to India.

iPadOS is bad - just jarring enough, to break the flow, that you can continue to write. I find less desire to do something else on the iPad, not so on my Mac. It’s easier to find something to read, something to browse on the Mac.

Threads’ new ‘Dear Algo’ feature lets you tell the algorithm what you want to see by Jay Peters

To use the feature in a public post, type “Dear Algo” and then a description of what you want Threads’ algorithm to show you more of. Once you make your request, the change will stick for three days so you can see how it changes your feed. If you want to see more of the new content in your feed over the long term, interact with those posts.

It sounds like a good feature - a good use of LLMs. It is still opaque though.

Pluralistic: Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (11 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe "urgently" needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard

Vibe coding Nothing’s apps is fun, until you try to make them useful by Robert Hart

The second issue is a potentially fatal hurdle for a project like this: me. I’ve been reporting on AI tools for years, and one pattern keeps repeating—no matter how capable a system is, the hardest part is knowing how to use it to its potential. I immediately ran into that using Nothing’s Essential App Builder. It seems very capable and has great potential, but I didn’t always know what I wanted, and when I did, I didn’t always know how to ask for it. An ecosystem built on vibes is a great idea, but sometimes vibes aren’t enough.

Good to know that there may yet be a future for us techies.