David Lynch: the weirdo who made it in the mainstream

Joshua Rothman commemorates David Lynch in the New Yorker:

When Lynch was fourteen, his family moved to Alexandria, Virginia. There, a friend named Toby Keeler mentioned in passing that his father was a painter. As soon as Lynch visited the studio, he knew that he wanted to live “the art life.” With a friend, Lynch rented a studio of his own and all but dropped out of high school to make dark, Expressionist paintings.

I've noticed a lot of great auteur filmmakers start out in more "primal" art mediums—painting, sculpting, etc. I think they're just people who are drawn toward aesthetic beauty and meaning like moths to a flame, and can't imagine living for anything else.

In 1964, Lynch went to art school—first at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, and then at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. Boston left him uninspired; he preferred Philadelphia’s industrial wastelands and abundant lunatics. In Philly, his neighborhood was so dangerous that, when he went out, he carried a wooden stick studded with nails. An apartment he lived in was near a morgue, and Lynch met someone who worked there at a diner; the man offered him a tour, after which Lynch sat among the corpses.

Some places and experiences are just more inspiring.

Lynch’s ideas weren’t pictures on a mood board. They were experiences, which could only be realized cinematically, through combinations of performance, visual composition, music, sound, and an often dilatory use of time. Because the ideas went beyond language, it wasn’t easy for Lynch to explain them to collaborators; he developed strategies for helping them embrace his vagueness. Transcendental Meditation, which he began practicing in the seventies, had both a creative function—it helped Lynch regard his ideas nonjudgmentally—and a social one: it smoothed out his rough edges, lending him the aura of a benevolent guru. (“Your anger. Where did it go?” Reavey asked him, a few weeks after he began meditating.) Practitioners of T.M. chant individualized mantras; in “Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks,” by Brad Dukes, the actress Wendy Robie recalls how, similarly, Lynch “would go to each actor in a scene and he would have a word for you, a private magical word, and it was yours to use.” Mädchen Amick recalls a moment when Lynch “put his hand on my arm, and looked at me, then he sighed and walked away, and it was as if he’d infused me with the emotion the scene called for.”

It's only weird if it doesn't work.

The world and our culture within it have become rational,” Karl Ove Knausgaard writes, in his novel “The Wolves of Eternity.” “We live and have lived now for a long time in an age governed by the paradigm of science, in which all that contradicts rational thought is gradually expelled.” Our rational impulses are so automatic, and so strong, that we’re now faced with the problem of what to do with the irrational. The way people lived for much of human history can seem alien to us...

In Knausgaard’s novel, which is set in a realistic, modern-day Norway, rationality is suspended when an actual miracle occurs: a new star appears in the night sky. People have visions, and see demons. Suddenly, anything seems possible, and experience replaces thought. The world can’t be analyzed or understood, but only lived through and intuitively explored.

Have you ever been seized by a sudden feeling of beauty and mystery in a way that can't be explained? And, in addition to the beauty and mystery, the aesthetics of the moment—the place or room you were in; the song that was playing; the weirdly specific thing you became fixated on—seem odd and disjointed to the point of feeling like you're in a dream? While most of us move on from these moments once the rapture passes—chalking it up to coincidence—it seems as if David Lynch built an entire career out of seeking these moments, writing down their every detail, and then using the medium of film to share them with the world.

If I had never seen any of Lynch's work, like Mulholland Drive or Twin Peaks, I would've never believed that this surrealist approach to film could work—there's just no way you could ever make anything watchable out of material that comes from such a deeply personal dream realm. Maybe you could get a couple hipsters to pretend to like it, but have it succeed in the mainstream? No way.

And yet, David Lynch thrived. I watched Blue Velvet a few days ago after hearing of his passing, as if to confirm once again that the Lynchian magic still holds up—yup. After roping me in with classic, pleasant Americana aesthetics, he once again had me confronting the weirdness and darkness that lurks inside us all—the kind that has no name nor language with which it can be spoken of.

David Foster Wallace was somewhat famously obsessed with David Lynch, and even gave him credit for helping him realize the difference between great and shitty avant-garde art. You can watch him discuss this here.

I agree with DFW that a lot of people who fancy themselves avante-garde-style artists—or postmodern artists, or experimentalists, or whatever term you like—are at the end of the day just hipsters making junk that no one is ever going to connect with because they're trying too hard, and are too in their own head about making something different. This self-consciousness causes them to lose track of the most important thing: precisely communicating that pure, unadulterated magic that was spawned from the surreal experience that gave them the creative spark in the first place. This is because this communication is where all the connection lies, no matter how strange the final product appears on the surface. Lynch was obsessed with this communication, and so dogged in being true to his visions that he couldn't help but be totally authentic and himself. This is exactly why despite all the weirdness and surreal elements, millions of people still "get it"—and feel seen in ways that no other films had made them feel seen before—when they watch his stuff.

I can think of no higher compliment for an artist. Lynch really did something new and fresh with the medium. I can't wait to rewatch more of his stuff. Rest in peace.

Have we reached Peak Elon?

From Mizy Clifton at Semafor (link):

Only about 3 in 10 US adults strongly or somewhat approve of US President Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by his ally Elon Musk, according to an Associated Press/NORC poll published Friday.
While most Americans believe the federal bureaucracy is plagued with problems and in need of an overhaul, the poll suggested that many did not believe the tech billionaire was the right person to lead the effort.

While this poll is specific to the DOGE thing, it is probably not a terrible proxy for Elon's approval rating in general.

Something I've been wondering since Musk jumped on the MAGA train and started what seems like a slide into even more bizarre, cringe, and erratic behavior than we're used to—which is saying a lot—is at one point is his stock actually going to drop?

When are people finally going to be fed up enough with his bullshit to the point where people on both sides of the aisle finally agree he's got to go, and it's time to stop giving him all this attention? There's a lot you could say when it comes to Musk, but I think more than anything, he's just fucking annoying. He also seems to have lost all the redeeming "rocket man" charisma he had at one point. Online right culture appears to have swallowed him whole, and he's just a troll now.

While I think on paper it may seem like he's on top of the world after Trump's win, I suspect it's going to be all downhill from here—especially because we seem to have already reached Peak Tesla, as the car company is set to continuously lose marketshare going forward.

Even if Musk and Trump can last 4 years without having some sort of falling out, I don't think 2028 will be kind to either of them.

Prior to true AGI, how is AI ever going to be good business?

From a New York Times article about the new AI chatbot from DeepSeek, a Chinese startup:

The DeepSeek chatbot answered questions, solved logic problems and wrote its own computer programs as capably as anything already on the market, according to the benchmark tests that American A.I. companies have been using.
And it was created on the cheap, challenging the prevailing idea that only the tech industry’s biggest companies — all of them based in the United States — could afford to make the most advanced A.I. systems. The Chinese engineers said they needed only about $6 million in raw computing power to build their new system. That is about 10 times less than the tech giant Meta spent building its latest A.I. technology.

After the recent Stargate announcement from the White House where tech leaders, standing with Trump, announced a gargantuan $500 billion investment in "AI infrastructure," I just couldn't help but wonder if all this money being thrown at AI, in this very short period of time, is just going to get torched. It all just feels very hype-y and gold-rush-y.

I don't see how it makes sense from a business perspective, unless the investment directly leads to actual AGI—which is highly unlikely in any reasonably short time frame.

It makes sense from a national security perspective—not wanting to be dependent on foreign countries for critical tech, etc.—but it's just a lot of money, really fast. Not to mention that, for some crazy reason, they have invited possibly the greatest money torcher/bullshit artist in corporate history, Masayoshi Son (the guy who invested billions into WeWork, lol), to help lead the charge.

And now I've just found out about DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that appears to be in the same ballpark as the leading American LLMs/chatbots, who accomplished their feat at a fraction of the cost and using a fraction of the advanced chip tech that we've all been led to believe–thanks to the emerging NVIDIA-industrial complex—is necessary in order to even think about building this stuff.

And yet this comes after years of Sam Altman constantly campaigning, podcasting, begging and instilling this notion throughout the business and tech communities—planting a seed, if you will—that further developments in AI are going to require a level of investment the world has never seen (trillions!). And that if we don't give them this money, we will lose so badly to China in the AI race that they'll beat us to AGI and use it to conquer and enslave us.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I think there's a good chance that Altman is only spreading this belief that he needs a trillion dollars simply because he wants a trillion dollars. And all these VCs, and Trump, are falling for the psyop. Altman knows better than anyone that the true number one role of the modern tech startup CEO is that of a fundraiser. And, love it or hate it, he who raises the most money—through charisma, networking, appearances on pseudo-intellectual podcasts that rile up the normies, etc.—is the one who wins in the Valley, even if most of the money gets torched in the process. Just ask Adam Neumann and Masayoshi Son.

To really hammer the point home, imagine you've just started a company whose goal is to create the best nail clippers in the world. And you have competition, as you've learned there are some other startups also getting into the nail clippers biz. So, how much money do you want to raise in order to hire top talent and design and make these nail clippers?

Let's say you raise $10 million dollars to design and make these nail clippers—that's a lot of money for such a simple product! But wait, you've now learned your competition has apparently raised $10 billion dollars! In other words, they've outraised you by a factor of one thousand!

Does this scare you? Does this mean that you're totally going to lose now, and you might as well close up shop? No, of course not. You'd laugh your ass off, and be dying to know what in the hell this company could possibly be wasting billions of dollars on in their attempt to build... nail clippers.

The point is, when developing any kind of product, there is a diminishing return on each marginal dollar raised beyond a certain point, once you've already reached the maximum amount of money that can be used (reasonably) productively.

Do these AI startups really need all this money, or are these shifty CEOs just striking the fundraising iron while it's hot, having snake charmed everyone into thinking they're the chosen tech gurus who hold the sole key to the future? Or worse, deep down guys like Altman and Amodei know that OpenAI and Anthropic don't actually have the moat/competitive advantage they pretend to have (e.g. DeepSeek) so they need to raise as much money as they can ASAP before the hype fades and everyone realizes they're not wearing any clothes.

I understand that building AGI may very well take many billions, over time—but trillions, right this second?

I don't know.

Quote: Ira Glass on taste

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” - Ira Glass

PredictIt season is upon us: the story of how I doubled my money betting on the 2020 election, and exploring the potential for round 2 in 2024

A fool and his money are soon parted.

Primary season for the 2024 Presidential Election begins in a few weeks—starting with New Hampshire and Iowa.

While the official start of the 2024 election cycle means many things for many people, in one corner of the world/internet, it means it's time to make some money.

In 2020 I caught wind of a new and legal way to bet on US politics: PredictIt.org It is a site the allows you to place limited bets on political events, using a clever, market-based system based on buying “shares” of outcomes. I discovered the site in the weeks before the 2020 Biden vs. Trump election and, after comparing the markets on the site to popular polling data, it seemed that many of the people betting on the site had virtually no respect for polling data whatsoever.

Specifically, the site seemed flooded with Trump voters who, thanks to the surprise of the 2016 election, felt that the polls were underestimating Trump once again. While believing that the polling data was underestimating Trump again was not crazy, the extent to which these market-setting bettors believed the polls were off, based on the bets they were placing on the site, was batshit.

Looking at the pricing on the site, across the board, these Trumpsters were implying a margin of error ~2 standard deviations away from standard margins of error for polling. In short, they were betting that the margin of error for the 2020 election polls would not just be larger, but significantly larger than it was in 2016.

It seemed like an easy opportunity to make some cash—so easy, I thought there had to be a catch. But while the site does take a fee on winnings, and there is a max limit on each individual bet ($850, last time I checked), I calculated that I could make a virtually risk-free ~30% return on any money I put into the site. While 30% return is not exactly hitting the lottery, it is an incredible rate of return for a single event, and would absolutely fast-track the growth of my young portfolio.

As it turned out, I was selling myself short. I actually went on to make over 100% return on the ~$7,000 I placed on bets across the site, ending with ~$14,000 total. How? I was able to make way more money than I originally thought because of the unique mail-in ballot situation.

If you remember the night of the 2020 election, it started out looking really good for Trump, but this was only because the mail-in ballots were the last to come in, and the mail-in ballots skewed significantly Democrat. Of course, the pundits calling the election on TV pointed out this fact every 5 seconds, but evidently this was still not enough to prevent the bettors of PredictIt from losing their cool.

As the first wave of votes came in, giving Trump early leads in most states (as expected), the markets on PredictIt went wild, and the cost of buying shares in a Biden victory in many states became even cheaper than they already were. Watching this panic unfold in real time—both via group chats with friends and family, and the actual markets on PredictIt—I knew that if I played my cards right and rolled my winnings from the first states to call the election into the states that had not yet called a winner, I could make way more money than I had originally thought possible. It was going to be a long night. My roommates in my cramped Pacific Beach apartment thought I was crazy as I made myself another pot of coffee at 8pm and strapped in.

My strategy remained conservative, based purely on polling data, and with no guess work involved. I only bet on Biden to win in states that were not closely contested, and, even then, as a baseline margin of safety, I assumed a massive 8% margin of error in the polls that skewed entirely in Trump’s direction.

When the dust settled the next morning—despite, if memory serves, the election still being ongoing thanks to the slowness of Arizona and chaos in Georgia—every single bet I had placed had paid off. It was hard to believe I had made so much easy money in such a short period of time, based on such a boring strategy. But it felt great. Outside of this, I had never been a gambler, but I now totally understood the gambler’s high. There is something about noticing an opportunity, actually taking the risk to act on it, and then having it pay off that makes you feel valid and alive.

Buzzing from victory and a fat pay day, I naturally wondered if I could repeatedly make money like this on PredictIt, even outside of a major election. In short, the answer seems to be no. I occasionally check back in on the site, and while there are definitely some tempting markets, there is no widespread, systemically lopsided stuff going on like there was during election week in 2020.

I’m assuming the reason for this is simple: outside of the major elections, the core of chronic PredictIt bettors is made up of people who are generally more highly-educated and statistically aware—nerdy, political, Nate Silver-y types. But once the major election cycle gets going, hordes of inexperienced “normies” show up to the site—with their dubious grasp of probability theory and wacko conspiracy theories in tow—and this is where the money is. It’s very much a seasonal movement. Waiting for election season as a PredictIt regular is like being a shop owner in a ski resort in the fall: just counting down the days until the out-of-towners show up with their money.

Unlike sports gambling, where you’re betting against odds makers who may be better at math than you, on sites like PredictIt you’re betting against someone else. “You don’t have to be smarter than [an odds maker],” says Derek Phillips, a 38-year-old creative writing PhD dropout who for several years made his living exclusively from PredictIt and earned some $140,000 in 2016 (presidential election years offer the biggest prizes; midterms are more of a little bump). “You have to be smarter than somebody who believes that Trump is going to win the election that he already lost.”

- quote from an article by Courtney Rubin in Fast Company

It feels necessary to pause here and say that I do care about America and what happens in this country politically, and when it comes to the fragmentation of our country, the rise of conspiracy theories, and the general/concerning trend toward authoritarianism, the current state of things makes me feel extremely concerned and sad. Despite this, I am not some pessimistic, red-pilled type. I am a voter, and outside of the current PredictIt/betting context that I’m writing this article in, I have a political self who does not think nor care about the money/betting side of politics that PredictIt enables.

I have also thought about whether it is wrong to essentially take money from people who show up to a website to effectively place bets on their deranged political theories. The verdict is in: I don't care. If anything, it's good for them—few things are more sobering and educational than losing money due to your beliefs. I actually rank losing money trying to beat the stock market as a teenager as one of my most fortunate and formative developments. It taught me a ton about how irrational the emotions that take hold of you can make you when your wallet is on the line, and undoubtedly saved me from a lot of pain down the road (for example, I was able to skip and ignore the crypto craze that seemed to claim many young men’s souls during the pandemic).

The point is, as I sit here waiting for election season to start, I like to think of the privilege to place bets on PredictIt as a small reward/consolation for sitting through and participating in the misery of American politics in general. In the coming weeks, I, like everyone else, will be paying increasingly more attention to politics and the election. In tandem, I will also be paying more attention to what’s going on on PredictIt. If I notice any opportunities like the one I saw in 2020, I’ll post about them here. However, as a baseline, I’m not going to get my hopes up and will assume that the easy-money days are over. But we’ll see.

God bless America.

Quote: thinking inside the box

"When we first started the band, we wanted to have a formula,” he says. “It’s like, ‘This is what we do, and we’re not gonna try and go outside the box too much. We’re gonna explore the box we’re in. I’ve always been a big fan of that. I used to be in bands where was like, ‘Man, we’ve gotta think outside the box!’ And all I’m thinking is: ‘You guys don’t even know.’ Music should never be just for the sake of being experimental. Before you even start, you have to know what you’re experimenting with first.”

- Mark Speer, lead guitarist of Khruangbin

In praise of boring backend tech

For awhile now I've had the goal of making a Django Rest Framework boilerplate starter that I could quickly spin up to use as a backend, and pair with my React frontends, for various SaaS ideas. I wanted to be able to just run a few commands and have a fully featured backend that is easy to manage, easy to iterate on, secure, and built on boring, mature, battle-tested technology that makes security and maintenance a breeze.

Django, the python-powered web framework for "perfectionists with deadlines," is famous for meeting all of these production-ready requirements in an efficient and painless way, while also providing the option to override and customize any feature you need. The out-of-the-box admin UI is also a game-changer.

For these reasons, I've noticed a lot of prolific and actually successful indie developers also using mature frameworks like Django or Rails for their backends in order to quickly ship their SaaS MVPs ideas, taking them from idea to (truly) production-ready application in 2-3 weeks of relatively easy/gentle coding, instead of 2-3 months of manically hacking together whatever the NodeJS runtime backend-stack-du-jour happens to be. These coders often sacrifice multiple weekends writing custom code and queries for really basic functionalities that mature backend frameworks have built-in. And, even if they've found ways to cut down their dev time by using boilerplates etc., they're kidding themselves if they are actually convinced that what they've written as a single, indie dev is a) secure by professional standards and b) not going to be a huge timesuck/much more difficult to maintain as months go by and their massive dependency tree of npm packages inevitably leads to breakage.

If not already obvious, I'm in the camp that believes backends should be boring. I think the hype cycle of online web dev communities and twitter routinely brainswashes many young junior/intermediate developers into thinking they always need to be using the latest, shiny, bleeding-edge backend tooling, when in reality, for 95% of startups, you really don't need (or want) anything more than an old-school REST API. I also think this is what most legit, actually productive older developers already know, there's just a visibility bias where we are never going to hear much from these people because they aren't hanging out on tech twitter, gushing over how they added GraphQL and a NoSQL DB to their to-do app; they're shipping their projects and then getting on with their lives.

And an aside for the performance junkies: the boring reality is that the vast majority of opportunities most apps have to meaningfully increase their speed/performance for users (insofar as it relates to the backend) does not have to do with the benchmark speeds of different languages and frameworks; it has to do with caching—yet another thing that mature frameworks all have built-in defaults for. I'm happy for you that the response time and throughput of your async Node.js backend beats my monolithic, synchronous Django backend out of the gate, but if we're being honest, most endpoints are cache-able, at least to some extent, so I can just add a couple lines of code, and now I'm back on top again. That is until you burn at least a few hours (which really add up over time) of your life figuring out how to add Redis to your go-to Node.js backend library of the month, and then we're practically tied.

You're just naturally not going to find a lot of hype-y web influencer content in your tech feeds surrounding old frameworks like Rails and Django. This isn't because they're "dying," there's just nothing new to sell or push with these frameworks because they've already "made it." There's not a deluge of new content for Twitter thread bois (👇🧵) to put out on mature frameworks because these frameworks have already solved every generic problem there is when it comes to backend web app development, including, but not limited to:

• Authentication
• Database models/ORM
• Backend administration (Django's built-in admin UI 🙌)
• Permissions
• CRUD endpoints defaults
• Throttling & pagination
• Robust error handling and debugging
• Background tasks & task scheduling

The fact that you get these features by default is not something to be bored by, it's something to jump around and rejoice over. As developers, we already have to spend tons of time staying current on trends in both tooling and tech in general. I'm going to take any opportunity I can get to use reliable technologies that save me time—without sacrificing quality—so I can focus my bandwidth elsewhere. Life is too short. And, unless your startup is in the 3% of new startups that really do have a foundational need for cutting-edge speed or realtime features, using mature frameworks for SaaS MVP backends is simply the right move from both a technical and businesses standpoint—assuming you're actually serious about things like security, scalability, and developing additional features quickly.

Anyway, I finally made my Django backend starter, and I haven't been this excited to code and build things in a long time (by the way, I’ll be sharing much of what I build on this blog going forward, so feel free to subscribe to receive new post updates if you’re curious). I'm solidly in the React camp for frontends, but I'm burnt out on keeping up with cutting-edge backend technologies to maintain my full-stack status just because young, impressionable developers and first-time SaaS founders think that they need them. It's okay if you like playing around with cutting-edge tech as a hobby, especially if you're new to development and excited and soaking it all up like a sponge, but at this point I'd rather put my time towards my life outside of programming than keep burning the midnight oil, reinventing the wheel every time I want to make a new project. I recommend more people do the same.

And if you're daunted by the prospect of learning a new programming language in order to use more mature backend frameworks, don't be; if you're reading this, there's a good chance that if you took just 1/10th of the time that you spend troubleshooting cutting-edge tech and put it toward learning the basics (all you need) of a new language, you'd be cruising in no time. You would enjoy the learning process, too—learning the basics of mature frameworks is a breath of fresh air if you've spent the last several years fighting in the trenches of the trendy.

P.S. I want to, but I'm not going to open source my new Django Rest starter that I've mentioned above for security reasons, even though it's not exactly the most complex piece of software in the world. However, if you want to talk Django or want any help, feel free to reach out to me on twitter—and don't forget to subscribe to this blog for more tech rants and project updates.