🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 187
April 24th, 2025
Episode 187 — April 24th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/187
Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Boris Smus, MK, Neel Mehta
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Alex Komoroske, Ben Mathes, Chris Butler, Dart Lindsley,Dimitri Glazkov, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Julka Almquist, 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.
“A man is worked upon by what he works on. He may carve out his circumstances, but his circumstances will carve him out as well.”
― Frederick Douglass
✨🪨 Selling the future, holding the present
A sales lead is nearing the close of a strategic deal. The client is excited… but some of the most compelling features are still works in progress with no confirmed delivery date. The company sees the future clearly, but reality is taking its time to catch up. The lead wants to help secure the opportunity while also maintaining trust with the client.
This is the ongoing tension between steward and seller. We might associate this tension with shady sales tactics, but it is also a structural feature of ambitious systems. Vision needs belief to move forward. But belief without grounding can become risk disguised as momentum.
Sometimes the seller and the steward are separate roles: one person pitches the dream, another safeguards the delivery. At other times, the tension resides within a single individual. Especially in leadership, we’re asked to play both roles—to invite others into a bold future and ensure the path there is responsible, honest, and humane.
In healthy systems, these roles support each other. A good seller brings energy and vision. A good steward makes sure that the vision is achievable. But when the gap between vision and reality stretches too far or the pressure to deliver overshadows the ability to follow through, the balance starts to shift. What was once aspirational can become extractive.
How do we know when we’ve crossed a line? A helpful internal check is, “Would I want someone I care about on the receiving end of this pitch?” Just because you can sell something doesn’t mean you should. “Selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price” doesn’t hold up as a justification if you know you won’t be able to deliver.
In other words, it’s not just about avoiding risk. Selling the future always involves some degree of uncertainty. But we need to pay attention to who absorbs that uncertainty. Are we equipping others to make a clear-eyed choice, or asking them to carry ambiguity we don’t want them to see?
In systems that last, belief and care aren’t in conflict; they’re in collaboration. When you feel friction between stewards and sellers, don’t ignore it. Use it as a signal to ask if the pitch you’re making is matched by the commitment to deliver it.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🚢 US shipping volume has been pulled forward in response to incoming tariffs
Data on incoming ships at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest port in the Western Hemisphere, is showing an interesting pattern: import volumes for this week are up a staggering 56% from the year before, but the next two weeks are showing year-over-year declines of 11% and 33% respectively. The simplest explanation is “front-running”, where firms import large quantities of goods in the short window between when tariffs are announced and when they take effect.
🚏💾 Wikipedia is giving its data to AI developers to stop scraping bots
Wikipedia’s servers have been struggling under an onslaught of crawlers and scrapers seeking training data for LLMs; the site’s parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, has reported a 50% increase in bandwidth usage. Wikimedia has thus agreed to meet LLM creators where they’re at by releasing a structured (JSON) dataset of all English and French articles on the ML data platform Kaggle. Wikimedia is advertising this 80 GB dataset as an easier alternative to “scraping or parsing raw article text” for developers, and it’s certainly a better outcome for Wikipedia, too.
🚏🇨🇦 AI-written books on Canadian party leaders are flooding Amazon ahead of the election
As Canada prepares for its federal election next week, AI-generated books about its major party leaders have been flooding Amazon. At least 16 books about Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney were listed on Amazon in March alone, with five published on a single day. (One of these books sports a picture of a man who isn’t Mark Carney.) Meanwhile, some prolific AI-assisted authors have published books on Carney’s chief rival, Pierre Poilievre. One such author has written 550 books on a wide range of topics, from air fryer recipes to British history, while another author, with 205 books to their name, has previously written about chemtrails and Celine Dion.
🚏✈️ China sent back a $55M jumbo jet made too expensive by tariffs
Boeing recently delivered a 737 Max to a Chinese facility, where the plane will undergo final assembly for a regional airline. However, before the customer could take to the skies in the plane (estimated price: $55 million), it was quietly returned to Boeing’s airfield in Seattle. It’s unclear who decided to return the plane, but the ultimate reason was likely China’s 125% tariffs on American goods, which were imposed in response to the US’s 145% tariff on Chinese imports. Indeed, the Chinese government recently asked Chinese airlines to stop buying planes from American manufacturers.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
AI Reasoning Models Can Cheat to Win Chess Games (MIT Technology Review) — Observes that LLMs aren’t especially good at playing chess on their own, but the latest reasoning models, such as OpenAI's o1, tend to embrace tool use and explore the chess metagame, coming up with strategies like overwriting the board with a different game state to give itself a decisive advantage, or spinning up a copy of Stockfish (a state-of-the-art chess AI) for assistance.
The Density Divide and the Southernification of Rural America (Will Wilkinson) — Argues that urban vs. rural has replaced Northern vs. Southern as the primary divide in American politics, and as a result, rural communities across the country have developed a homogeneous culture (country music, big trucks, Southern twang, etc.) that’s displaced local variations like the Upper Midwest’s Scandinavian-inspired accents. This unified rural culture is largely derived from the South, leading to incongruities like farmers in Maine and Oregon (both Union states) flying the Confederate flag.
Recipes for Thought (Dimitri Glazkov) — Dimitri, a veteran FLUXer, writes that, by codifying our cognitive processes as a cascade of steps that an LLM can do, we are challenged to uncover our tacit knowledge and also create templates for others to use and remix.
How an Old Pitch Went From Ridiculed to Back in Fashion (Mike Petriello / MLB) — Traces how the pitching ‘metagame’ in baseball has evolved: the sinker (a fastball that drops as it approaches the plate) lost popularity as batters got good at hitting it, so pitchers started throwing more fastballs ‘up in the zone,’ but then batters adapted to that, so pitchers started throwing the sinker again. The pitch also became nastier, gaining speed and horizontal movement. It’s a great example of how metagames evolve: both cyclically, as competing techniques wax and wane in popularity, and linearly, as players refine their strategies.
🔮📬 Postcard from the future
A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that could result from the systemic forces changing our world.
// What lengths might workers go for a break,
// when they are always online,
// companies demand more,
// managers chase impact,
// teams are pushed harder,
// and LLMs enable anyone to question the specialists?
[20 months in the future…]
Cory sips from a cup of coffee, sighing as they close their eyes for a moment to savor a moment of peace. <Ding> goes their phone; another notification that their boss is adding comments to the proposal. Cory looks at the time, 11 pm on Saturday, and shakes their head. It won’t let up.
Cory’s boss, Riley, is on the career treadmill, striving to get promoted to Senior Director. Thanks to having kids, living in Palo Alto, and general lifestyle inflation, they are always pushing, pushing, pushing. The other Directors are doing the same, in a classic Red Queen’s race. So Riley bears down on their team, expecting them to work as hard as they are and respond to comments and questions immediately.
Cory pulls up “The Tally,” a running, timestamped list of every single micromanaging event by Riley. The mean time between requests has steadily been shrinking. At least two every weekend. At least five after 10 pm during the week. Sure, Riley could be using AI to time these posts and pings, but only Cory and their team see these items. Riley’s boss only saw Riley’s version of finished presentations, proposals, and reviews, with Cory's and their team's work sanitized away.
<Ding> goes the phone. Another one. Cory growls in frustration, a tear forming in their eye. <Ding> Something inside of them shifts and a look of determination settles onto their face. They pick up their personal phone, not connected to any of their company’s services or systems, and dial the number of an old school friend.
“Diego! I need your help. That thing you do? I… I… I need it. Can you send me the info? Thanks—”
<Bong> A message appears on Cory’s personal phone.
Welcome to DBaaS — Distracting Bosses as a Service!
Need your boss to stop micromanaging you? Want the notifications to stop? Need time to do actual work rather than asking “how high?” when someone says “jump”? We’ve got you covered. We don’t commit 187s or hurt people, we distract them.
We offer a range of options. Send us the socials and LinkedIn of your target, we’ll find weak links in their social graph, define any limited hobbies they may have, and analyze their posts for promising interest areas with opportunities for ‘engagement,’ along with their likes and follows to see which categories of leaders they admire.
Services include:
Hobbies: Introducing them to a new time-consuming and competitive hobby like rock climbing or scuba diving.
Charity: Bringing them into the world of conspicuous charity giving, where being at the right galas and schmoozing at the right resorts will take up time they previously spent on work.
Politics: Depending on your boss’s interests, we can ramp up their awareness of issues they will find quite vexing, prompting them to get much more involved, spending their precious time to talk to politicians, and not to you.
Dating: Is your boss single? We can help fix that.
Our more ‘aggressive’ approaches include:
Phone glitching: We’ll make it so your boss’s phone starts having problems connecting to Wifi.
Gig-ride disruption: Boss using their Uber or Lyft to launch a thousand pings? We’ll either prevent it from showing up in the first place or have the driver apply some of our special formula to the car to induce motion sickness when looking at a screen.
Plane Wi-Fi disablement: Let's ensure that your boss cannot connect to Wi-Fi on the trip from SFO to London.
Home power outage: Just disabling home network access isn’t sufficient for the corp executive; they’ll just be on their phone, pinging away. We’ll take down all the power.
“We’re here to help.”
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