🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 204

August 28th, 2025

Aug 29, 2025

Episode 204 — August 28th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/204

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

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Alex Komoroske, Chris Butler, Dart Lindsley, Dimitri Glazkov, 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.

“There's a reason you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”
— Rear Admiral William Adama, Battlestar Galactica

⚠️🌋 Don’t climb the brown hill

To improve their product, a company allows users to give thumbs-up/down reactions to LLM responses. It’s super useful, but over time, the logging accrues so much metadata that a motivated actor can easily recover identifying information. When a data leak associates individuals with sensitive queries, it’s a privacy nightmare. Suddenly, what looked like a win has become a trap. This wasn’t a tech failure. It wasn’t a team gone rogue. It was a failure of values: the team promised anonymity but did not prioritize privacy by design.

Values are often mistaken for fluff: words on walls, gestures meant to signal social responsibility. But values aren’t decoration. They’re not about branding. And they’re definitely not about being nice. Values are alignment constraints. They are structural boundaries that shape what a team or culture is willing to do—and not do.

In fast-moving, complex environments where no one has perfect information, values direct distributed judgment. Most organizations are too complex for top-down control. Values allow local, fast, contextual decisions to stay loosely aligned with global integrity. They're how a system holds its shape under pressure.

And values hold memory. Teams turn over. Context disappears. Past mistakes get smoothed over. But values encode the shape of past mistakes as limits. “We ensure privacy by design” becomes a form of muscle memory. Sometimes this muscle memory can become a bias that no longer serves us, but that is a case for updating our values, not abandoning them completely.

Values protect our sense of taste. In any system that rewards short-term outcomes at the cost of values, our internal compass will drift. We’ll start to feel proud of wins that should make us uneasy. If we keep optimizing for what works now, we’ll eventually forget what it feels like to cross the line. Values shine a light on that line.

Values help us build a system that can say “no”—even when a “yes” is oh-so-tempting. They help us stay coherent, especially when the pressure to win is high.

We can move fast. We can experiment. But without shared constraints, we’re just climbing the nearest hill. Values are the group memory that reminds us: brown hills are usually piles of sh*t.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏💊 Struggling biotechs are becoming “crypto treasuries” to pump their stocks

Small drug development firms raised massive amounts of money during the COVID period, but they’ve been struggling as of late amidst the US’s research funding cuts, trade war, and high interest rates. To stay relevant, at least ten biotechs have pivoted this year into becoming “crypto treasuries”: corporate shells that hold cryptocurrencies and thereby let public-market investors gain exposure to surging cryptocurrencies. One life sciences company rebranded as “ETHZilla” and bought up $350 million in Ethereum; it produced a massive (but fleeting) stock pump of 600%. Another biotherapeutics company announced the pivot and saw its share price jump 243% in a single trading session.

🚏🌍 Across Africa, solar panel imports from China are booming

Africa has imported 15,000 MW worth of solar panels from China in the last 12 months, a huge 60% increase from the preceding 12 months. This spike in imports has been continent-wide, with 20 countries setting all-time records in solar panel imports. Though solar panels are still a small fraction of oil imports in most of these African nations, it’s expected that the solar build-out will offset large amounts of diesel generator usage. In Nigeria, for instance, one solar panel (which retails for 60 USD) generates as much electricity in six months as does $60 worth of diesel; the quick payback time means the economics will tilt heavily toward solar instead of diesel going forward.

🚏🐦 Light pollution is keeping birds active longer

A new study of bird call recordings found that artificial lighting has made birds start singing 20 minutes earlier (on average) each morning and keep singing 30 minutes later each evening. This was “the largest analysis of light pollution’s biological impacts to date,” although it didn’t examine whether this shift in birds’ circadian day-night cycle was good or bad for them.

💊🍀 A dose of hopepunk

An optimistic sign that our world’s systems are changing for the better.

Here’s an interesting use case for robotics, computer vision, and decentralized solar power: using toy rabbits to catch invasive snakes. Biologists at South Florida’s water management department have teamed up with researchers at the University of Florida to devise a clever method for catching invasive Burmese pythons, which have been devastating populations of small mammals and birds in the Everglades. The scientists built solar-powered ‘robot rabbits’: they modified stuffed animals to emit heat, make sounds, and make natural movements, and then deployed these critters throughout the Everglades. When a python comes to attack the toy bunny, an installed video camera alerts a contractor to go capture the snake. The robots are much cheaper than live rabbit bait, and the scientists say the early results look promising.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

Games of Uncertainty (Vaughn Tan) — Reminds us about the distinction between risk, which can be measured and understood well, and uncertainty, which cannot. While many games focus on managing risk, very few prepare us for genuine uncertainty, which is often the largest challenge to overcome in real life scenarios. Perhaps the act of learning a new game is the closest games tend to bring us to building this intuition?
Teaching American Government in a Time of Crisis (Kevin J. Elliott, PhD) — A Yale political scientist observed that too many American government classes only teach how the US political system is supposed to work, not how it actually works, especially in the fractious moment the country now finds itself in. So, he created this all-new curriculum for an American government class, drawing heavily on comparative politics to situate American institutions in relation to those of other democracies. He shares detailed slides for 12 weeks of lectures.
Harder Drive: Hard Drives We Didn’t Want or Need (Sucker Pinch / YouTube) — A tongue-in-cheek exploration of information theory that tries to create persistent “storage” disks out of IP pings, Tetris games, and even used COVID tests. This is a classic project for SIGBOVIK, a humorous conference put on by CMU’s Association for Computational Heresy: build a bizarre or useless instantiation of an abstract computing concept (in this case, file systems) to advance our understanding of it.
Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges (R. Chetty, D. J. Deming, & J. N. Friedman) — A new paper in NBER observes that the push toward “holistic admissions” at elite universities, where standardized have become optional or even wholly ignored, might actually benefit wealthy candidates. As Paul Graf noted on Bluesky, “if you only used SAT to admit to elite colleges, [the] share of admits from top 1% income falls 15.8%→9.9% & representation from <$200k rises by +8.8%, with no drop in post-college results.”

📚🛋️ Book for your shelf

A book that will help you dip your toes into systems thinking or explore its broader applications.

This week, we recommend The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

by Evan Osnos (2025, 304 pages).

“In the Victorian era, it was said that the length of a man's boat, in feet, should match his age, in years.”

The Haves and Have-Yachts is a collection of essays originally published in The New Yorker and edited into a series of insights into the world of the ultra-wealthy. The explosion of superyachts (boats longer than 40 meters) in recent years is the jumping-off point, but this is just the start of Osnos’s foray into the lavish spending habits of the global 0.01%.

While interesting for voyeurs of the very rich, it’s more than just that. From a systems thinking perspective, this book offers a fascinating examination of the incentives, indulgences, social systems, and psychological distortions that define our economic age. As social and financial platforms consolidate power and neoliberalism pursues shareholder value at any cost, these systems have a direct impact on all of us. Knowing that is sometimes more than half the battle.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review