🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 189

May 8th, 2025

May 09, 2025

Episode 189 — May 8th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/189

Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Ben Mathes, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, MK, Boris Smus

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Alex Komoroske, 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.

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

🤔🙄 A split in negative space

The startup pitch ends. It’s slick and confident. Full of promise… and promises. One listener raises an eyebrow and asks, “I’m not sure the market is ready for this.” Another mutters under their breath, “They’re just cashing in on the latest hype.” Same moment, two reactions: one skeptical, the other cynical.

Sometimes negative questioning can look like obstruction. But not all questioning is created equal. Skepticism and cynicism often get conflated, especially in environments that prize optimism and forward motion. But there’s a key difference—skepticism holds space for possibility; cynicism shuts it down.

Skepticism says, “I don’t think this will work. I need to understand more.” It’s an open challenge, a gesture of care cloaked in doubt. Cynicism says: “This won’t work, and it probably never could.” It’s a closed loop, often born from past disappointments calcified into a worldview.

This isn’t a strict binary. The line between skepticism and cynicism is often blurry. We can slide between the two depending on the context, emotional state, or feeling heard. Skepticism’s unanswered question can morph into cynicism’s certainty.

The distinction has real implications for how cultures handle dissent. When teams confuse cynicism for valid critique, they risk building anti-curiosity cultures, where new ideas are dismissed before they’re explored. But when skepticism is discouraged because it feels too negative, systems lose one of their sharpest tools for course correction.

How can we tell the difference? Check for curiosity: Skeptical questions seek to uncover or refine, while cynical ones often foreclose. Track the emotional tone. Is there care underneath the critique? Skepticism often signals hope that something could be better, while cynicism rarely does.

Learning lives in the tension between what we think is true and the ground truth. Cynicism may reflect a broken feedback loop, while skepticism keeps the feedback loop alive.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🚛 Fully driverless trucks have started running long-haul routes

Many startups have successfully hauled customer loads with driverless trucks, but so far, they’ve all had safety drivers in the cab (and many only do short-haul deliveries). However, one startup, which has racked up 3 million miles of supervised hauling, is now removing the safety driver, marking the first “commercial driverless trucking service on public roads.” They currently have a single driverless truck doing long-haul roundtrips between Dallas and Houston, but they plan to scale up their fleet this year.

🚏🏘️ In England, all new homes will have solar panels by 2027

A new policy will require all English homebuilders to install solar panels on the roofs of newly built houses starting in 2027. The plan is expected to add £3000 to 4000 to a home's building cost but should save residents £1000 a year on energy bills. The government is also planning to offer loans and grants to help get roof-mounted solar panels built.

🚏📲 The hacked ‘archiving’ Signal clone stored messages in cleartext

Numerous high-level advisors in the US government apparently use the encrypted messaging app Signal for official communications. However, perhaps to comply with federal record-keeping laws, at least one used a third-party app called TeleMessage that archives your messages. TeleMessage was recently hacked, and researchers discovered that the app didn’t encrypt archived messages on its servers at all, meaning that the company behind it could access these messages in cleartext. The hacker has released screenshots showing access to government officials' phone numbers and email addresses, as well as messages referencing top politicians, including US Senators.

🚏🎮 The top-rated video games this year are all budget titles

Microsoft’s Xbox division and Nintendo have recently announced that several of their games, including Nintendo’s upcoming Mario Kart release, will sell for $80, well above the traditional price of $60. One gaming writer has observed that, in a perhaps related trend, the three highest-reviewed games of 2025 are budget titles, leaning much closer to indie games than AAA blockbusters. A small French game studio’s RPG is $50; a “puzzle-roguelike that was largely made by one guy in Los Angeles” is $30; and a mid-sized Swedish team’s cooperative multiplayer game is $50.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

How Ancient Rome Blew Up Its Own Business Empire (Bret Devereaux / Foreign Policy) [archived] — The historian behind the popular blog ACOUP argues that much of ancient Rome’s economic and military might stemmed from the free trade zone it created across the Mediterranean basin, along with a standardized currency, anti-piracy measures, standardized customs regimes, and other pro-trade actions. But when the Crisis of the Third Century led to shattered markets, heavy taxation, price-fixing, and a debased currency, Rome was left permanently weakened all the way until 476.
The Agent-First Developer Toolchain (Amplify Partners) — A VC fund argues that, in the age of AI coding agents, “value will increasingly shift from writing code to verifying and validating code”: engineers will focus on specifying the desired behavior of the system and navigating constraints and tradeoffs, while “AI agents” will “translate these directives into executable software.” Further examines what agent-first IDEs, version control systems, and CI/CD infrastructure, and automated testing might look like.
“An Egalitarian Pressure”: Australia Has Been Requiring People to Vote for 100 Years (Bolts) — A political science professor explains the history and impacts of compulsory voting in Australia, which went to the polls this week. An important effect is that “get out the vote” operations are neither necessary nor helpful, since nearly everyone will be voting anyway, so Aussie political parties have to focus on persuading voters rather than throwing out inflammatory statements or policies to mobilize their base.
No One Buys Books (The Elysian) — Compares book publishing houses to the venture capitalist business: they both invest small sums in lots of books and new ventures in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the rest.

🔮📬 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.

// In the face of ongoing layoffs, fear of AI taking jobs, and overall economic uncertainty, how might technical recruiting agencies change their tone with prospective employees?

[Late 2026]

Reese has searched for a mid-level engineering role for the past eight months. They’ve tried personal connections. They’ve tried recruiting agencies. They’ve tried to get through the AI-powered role scraping and spamming of applications, but so far, no luck. They reach out to a firm a friend says is “Different, kind of weird. But hey, it works.”

The response?

“Thanks for reaching out to TDH Recruiting! Your LinkedIn, resume, and social media profiles are a good match for our services.

“In today’s job market, you need assistance to find a job. You want stability? We offer customized services to help land you a role you’ll stay at for two or more years. Companies don’t care about people bouncing out after a year, but we know you do.

“We are incentivized to find you the right place: we don’t get paid unless you stay. For every year you stay at a company we place you at, from years two through five, you pay us a retention fee.

“You may think that the key is a positive culture fit, but we’ve found that what matters most is how you weather the challenges. What kind of organizational tension do you best tolerate? Terror? Dread? Horror? No human organization is free from conflict. What really matters is your alignment with an organization’s dominant conflict type.

“These three types are how we get our name, TDH: Terror, Dread, Horror. Which kind of fear can you operate under week after week?

Horror - You can tolerate the relics of bad things that happened in the past. Classic examples include products with massive technical and product design debt. You can bear witness to frequent outages and the regular departures of the unappreciative employee who had kept things going.
Terror - You take as a given that bad things are around the corner. You expect imminent worry and feel concern about specific events. Terror-based companies often lurch from crisis to crisis. Employees need to respond quickly to everything… even when it’s nothing.
Dread - If a vague sense of unease is more your style, if your worries and anxieties center on an uncertain future, we recommend dread. Maybe your future employer is pre-product-market fit. Maybe there is regulatory change on the horizon. Something wicked this way comes, but it is not here yet.

“So what do you want: Horror, Terror, or Dread?”

——————

From: TDH CEO

To: prospective investors

Greetings! As mentioned, we are raising funds to invest in publicly traded companies. We analyze the short, medium, and long-term performance of publicly listed joint stock corporations based on the dominant form of conflict. Critically, changes in the form of conflict lead to predictable changes in value. See the attached PowerPoint for further explanations of the TDH Investing Framework, e.g., how a company shifting from horror to dread tends to rise 10% over 1 year and decrease 10% over 5 years.

This investing framework relies on our proprietary talent-based information gathering. We believe our knowledge of these companies' internal cultures is a durable form of non-correlated alpha.

Please contact investorrelations@tdh.talent if you have any questions or are interested in joining the fund.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review