🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 176
February 6th, 2025
Episode 176 — February 6th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/176
Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Alex Komoroske, Ben Mathes, Chris Butler, Dart Lindsley,Dimitri Glazkov, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Julka Almquist, Justin Quimby, Kamran Hakiman, Lisie Lillianfeld, Melanie Kahl, Robinson Eaton, Samuel Arbesman, Scott Schaffter, Spencer Pitman, Wesley Beary
We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.
“When people feel that their value and worth are recognized in their relationships, they experience a sense of well-being that enables them to grow and flourish.”
— Donna Hicks
🌸🌳 Sincerely yours
You’re at a wedding, talking to someone you’ll probably never see again. You’re exchanging stories, laughing at shared observations, even getting into deep territory—work struggles, family quirks, hopes for the future.
We often judge relationships by how long they last, but longevity alone is a poor measure of value. Instead, sincerity—the willingness to be present, open, and engaged—can define whether a relationship, however brief, has meaning.
We can think of this as a 2x2 with one axis for sincerity and the other for longevity:
Lasting, sincere relationships are the gold standard: close friendships, strong family bonds, trusted colleagues—connections that feel rooted, growing deeper over time.
Lasting but insincere relationships, on the other hand, are born of obligation, habit, or necessity. This might be the coworker you tolerate, the family member you never really liked, or the friend of a friend you’re forced to hang out with. They can be draining, yet they linger, wilted but still standing.
Temporary, insincere relationships are purely transactional or forgettable—sales conversations, small talk with no genuine interest, a fleeting flirtation. These interactions dissolve as soon as they end. They popped in and out of existence but never really mattered.
Temporary, sincere relationships are moments of real connection that exist only as long as the context that creates them. Event guests you click with, travel friendships, deep discussions with strangers at a conference—these relationships don’t need permanence to be meaningful. They bloomed beautifully in the moment, even though they won’t last.
Sincere connections, even brief ones, carry weight. We often discount relationships that don’t last, assuming they aren’t worth investing in. However, if even temporary relationships can bloom, it’s worth bringing sincerity to every interaction. A single sincere exchange can make a moment richer.
Insincere relationships rarely transition into something better, but once-sincere ones can slowly wither into something performative. A close friendship that was once deeply meaningful may weaken over time, leaving interactions that feel more like habit than genuine connection. Can we recapture the magic? Sometimes, sincerity can revive it—through honest conversation and recognizing the change. Other times, the best choice is to let go. But even then, when life brings you back together (high school reunions, anyone?), treating the moment with curiosity and full attention can allow the relationship to bloom again briefly.
Not every sincere relationship will last forever. But the goal isn’t to make all relationships permanent—it’s to keep the ones we have real. Whether a connection lasts a night or a lifetime, sincerity is what gives it meaning.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🪤 Angry devs are making “tarpit” websites that can trap AI crawlers for months
Some website owners, frustrated at AI crawlers that don’t honor their robots.txt file, have created sections of their sites that trap crawlers in an “infinite maze” of randomly generated pages that link out to even more random pages. One of these “tarpits” claims it can trap a crawler for months. Tarpits can also feed the trapped crawlers junk text (“Markov babble”) in an attempt to poison their training data.
🚏👵 A British telecom launched an “AI granny” bot to waste scammers’ time
O2, a British telecom company, briefly released an AI voice bot, Daisy, that can hold long, meandering, and frustrating calls with scammers. When a fraudster tries to get her to turn on her computer and install some software, she keeps them on the line and wastes their time as she finds her glasses to look for the Internet Explorer icon, struggles to navigate menus, misunderstands app names (she hears the Google Play Store as “pastry”), and has irrelevant conversations about scones. In a trial, Daisy could keep a fraudster busy for up to 40 minutes at a time.
🚏🌡️ North Pole temperatures are 20 ºC above average
This past Sunday, temperatures in the far northern island of Svalbard (78 degrees north) were a full 20 ºC (36 ºF) above normal, close to ice’s melting point. (For example, Thursday’s forecast had a high/low of 29/26 ºF, while the average is 9/-1 ºF.) Near-melting temperatures were seen as high up as 87 degrees north.
Thursday’s weather forecast, in Fahrenheit, for Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Source: Accuweather
🚏🛣️ Scientists invented a “self-healing road surface” to fight potholes
Potholes form when water seeps into the roadway and freezes, making the bitumen (the black goo that holds the stones together) more brittle and prone to cracking. An international team of civil engineers and computer scientists used machine learning to model a clever solution: embedding plant spores soaked in recycled oil in the bitumen. When passing cars compress the asphalt, the spores release oil, which softens the bitumen and lets it flow to fill in any cracks. This “self-healing bitumen” could extend the lifespan of the road surface by 30%.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Code Is Law (2000) (Lawrence Lessig / Harvard Magazine) — Argues that the technical systems that govern our lives embody and “implement” a set of values: their architectures either enable free expression or suppress it; they either enable private communications (for all its pros and cons) or surveillance. Civil society thus has a responsibility to ensure our desired values are built into software, instead of ceding this ground to just the coders.
Managing for Emergence Through Abduction (Dave Snowden) — Argues that the only thing we know about complex systems is that any intervention will have unintended consequences. The way to manage this situation is to treat the system as an ecologist, not as an engineer: install the right ‘sensor network’ to detect emergence, then make small interventions to push incrementally in the direction of success, and away from failure.
How Coup D’états Really Work (Polymatter / YouTube) — Examines the recent history of coups to describe what situations lead to coups rather than revolutions (revolutions are built on passion, while coups are built on apathy); how coup leaders select a target, infiltrate the org chart, and select the smallest sufficient set of allies; and how leaders control the flow of information and use symbolism to make their newly seized power seem legitimate. Positive feedback loops work both ways: once a few people believe you have real power, more and more of the citizenry will get on board… but “as soon as one person resists, all others will be emboldened.”
Randomness 101: LavaRand in Production (Faik Sevim) — Describes how the internet security company Cloudflare famously uses a wall full of lava lamps to seed a true random number generator. Includes a useful discussion of entropy, chaos theory, and mixing as they apply to cryptography.
🔍💍 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: commitment.
A consulting agency has a choice: take on a lucrative but uninspiring client or engage with one that is riskier but has more strategic potential. Hesitating, the agency tries to keep both options open. As time drags on, neither client gets the attention they want and both move on. In trying to preserve optionality, the agency ends up with neither revenue nor strategic progress.
Commitment is often framed as a trade-off against flexibility, but it is critical to our agency. Choosing a path shifts us from passive observers to active shapers of our future, unlocking new capabilities, deepening relationships, and clarifying purpose.
We often miscalculate the cost of indecision. Keeping doors open feels safe but quietly drains energy and fractures focus. We need to hedge against risk while treating commitment as a resource to be allocated wisely. Just as financial investments compound over time, well-placed commitments generate increasing returns in clarity, trust, and progress. If a decision feels daunting, start with micro-commitments—low-stakes, high-feedback actions that build confidence and insight.
Instead of seeing commitment as a burden, treat it as an asset. Optionality creates potential. Commitment turns it into momentum.
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