Yesterday, METR, one of the many budding nonprofit “AI Safety” institutes in Berkeley, released a study purportedly showing that AI tools slowed down expert developers. Here’s the plot they led with in their announcement:

Because METR, like all AI Safety Institutes, is run by devout rationalists, the first four bars here are the values of predictions. Everyone asked said AI would speed up development time. The final bar is the observed result. Ackshually, AI slows down development time.

This result inevitably broke the internet. The reaction on Twitter was “Bro, that’s clearly wrong.” The reaction on Bluesky was “See, I told you so.” I didn’t check LinkedIn. I wonder if METR’s cross-posting was itself part of an ethnographic study of confirmation bias.

On Bluesky, Akhil Rao smartly pointed out that the error bar on the speedup is very close to zero and hence must be fragile. It’s a good rule of thumb. But he didn’t want to be “the seminar standard errors guy.”

Long-time readers know that horrible standard errors guy is me. I was ranting about AI papers and error bars last week. I wrote a whole paper about inferential error bars being a silly exercise unless we are using them as part of a clear regulatory rulebook. And hey, if everyone is freaking out about a study “proving” something with frequentist statistics, I’m going to be the sicko who goes and reads the appendix. You will not be surprised that I think the error bars are made up, even if there’s some interesting ethnography we can take away from METR’s work here.

Here’s a summary of how the study worked:

• METR recruited 16 developers

• All 16 brought approximately 16 coding tasks to the study that they wanted to complete.

• METR assigned each task to one of two conditions at random. Condition 0 is “you can’t use AI.” Condition 1 is “you can use AI.”

• The developers completed their tasks in whichever order they desired. METR recorded the completion time for each task

First, I don’t like calling this study an “RCT.” There is no control group! There are 16 people and they receive both treatments. We’re supposed to believe that the “treated units” here are the coding assignments. We’ll see in a second that this characterization isn’t so simple.

As experimenters, our goal is to figure out how the times in Condition 0 compare to those in Condition 1. There are a couple of ways to think about how to study this. If I were to take my guide from the “potential outcomes” school, I’d say something like the following.

There is an intrinsic amount of time each task takes in each condition. Unfortunately, I can only see one condition for each task. I can’t complete the tasks both with AI and without AI. I thus have a missing data problem. I can only see half of the times I care about in each condition. Perhaps I can use some clever math to estimate the actual average time in each condition had I seen everything. And I can use even more clever math to estimate the uncertainty in my estimate. You know, error bars.

This isn’t that crazy if you can sample uniformly at random. Let’s say you have a bunch of playing cards face down on the table in front of you. You want to estimate the proportion of the cards that are red. If you flip half of them uniformly at random, the proportion of red cards in your sample is a reasonable estimate of the proportion of red cars in the sample you didn’t see.

The problem in this study is that there are a bunch of steps required to go from randomizing the tasks to completing the tasks that cloud the estimation problem. These intermediary steps bias your estimation problem. The developers get to choose the order in which they complete the tasks. Task completion order can affect the amount of time it takes you to complete the task. For instance, if you're an expert developer and asked to use a new tool, you'll become faster with it after using it 8 times. Similarly, you can imagine that if you do a bunch of tasks in sequence, your time on task 4 is going to be sluggish because you are tired. There are lots of stories I can tell. There are undoubtedly many conditions that affect the time measurement other than their random assignment.

These other effects are called spillover or interference effects. In randomized trials, experimentalists work their tails off to remove these effects to ensure they are isolating the effect of the intervention. The ideal experiment satisfies SUTVA, the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption, which asserts that the only thing that affects a measured outcome is the assignment to the treatment group or the control group. This is a rather strong modeling assumption, but you perhaps could convince yourself that it is close to true in a carefully controlled, blinded study comparing a drug to a placebo.

Unfortunately, SUTVA does not hold in the METR study. And that means we have to bring out the econometrics to tell the difference between the groups. Here’s where we get to wrestle in the mud with statistics. If you go to the appendix of the paper, you can bore yourself to death with regression models and robustness checks. The main model that they use to make the widely circulated plot (from Appendix D on page 27) is this one:

This model more or less says the following: each developer estimates how long a task will take. The median time for each task without AI is a constant times this estimate. The median time with AI is a different constant times the developer estimate. The observed time is the predicted time multiplied by the speedup time for the condition, multiplied by a fudge factor, which is a random variable. The fudge factor is independent of the AI condition, the person’s time estimate, and all of the other fudge factors. The expected value of the fudge factor is one for all tasks. The variance of the fudge factor is the same for all tasks.

That is, if you’d prefer something that looks like code,

time(task) = speedup(AI_condition) * est_time(task) * fudge_factor(task)

Is that a reasonable model? The AI condition was assigned at random, so it should be independent of the estimated time. But the model assumes everyone experiences the same speed-up/slow-down with the AI tools. Since the fudge factor now includes the developers' choices for the order in which they perform the tasks, they can’t be probabilistically independent.

OK, so the model is not literally true, but perhaps you can convince me that it’s predictive? All models are wrong, amirite? The authors will now provide a bunch of “robustness checks” to convince you that it is close enough. Now we’re spending pages analyzing normal approximations when maybe we should accept that a precise estimate of “speedup” is impossible to measure with this experiment’s design.

After thinking about this for a day, the only data summary I’m happy with would be the following simple analysis: “there are 256 coding tasks, each has an intrinsic time inside of it, when we flip coins we get to see 128 of the times in Condition 1 and 128 of the times in Condition 2. Here are the means and standard deviations of these times. We could then all move on. I mean, rather than boring us with these robustness checks, METR could just release a CSV with three columns (developer ID, task condition, time). Then the seminar guys can run whatever dumb check they want.1

Let me be clear here, I don’t think METR’s analysis is better or worse than any random quantitative social science study. Measurement in quantitative social sciences is always fraught with an infinite regress of doubt. That doesn’t mean we can’t tell reasonable qualitative stories with quantitative data. What we can glean from this study is that even expert developers aren’t great at predicting how long tasks will take. And despite the new coding tools being incredibly useful, people are certainly far too optimistic about the dramatic gains in productivity they will bring.

Thanks to ‪Sam Anthony, Tilman Bayer‬, ‪Isaiah Bishop‬, ‪Robin Blythe‬, Kevin Chen, ‪Greg Faletto, Apoorva Lal‬, Jordan Nafa, Akhil Rao, Anton Strezhnev, and Stephen Wild for hashing these thoughts out on Bluesky last night.

Subscribe now

There is a lot of recent discussion about digital autonomy and Europe’s “position in the cloud”. Here, I want to break down and refute a commonly made argument: that the lead of American cloud providers is so great that we can never catch up. In the recent and excellent policy initiative “Clouds on the Horizon” (by Dutch political parties GL-PvdA and NSC), we can read on page 23 why this can’t be a reason to just give up.

I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption.

I’ve been pushing myself to write more lately because my co-authors and I have a whole fucking book to write between now and October. After ten years, you’d think this would be getting easier, not harder.

There’s something about putting out such memoiristic material that feels uncomfortably feminine to me. (Wow, ok.) I want to be known for my work, not for having a dramatic personal life. I love my family and don’t want to put them on display for the world to judge. And I never want the people I care about to feel like I am mining their experiences for clicks and content, whether that’s my family or my coworkers.

Many of the writing exercises I’ve been doing lately have ended up pulling on threads from my backstory, and the reason I haven’t published them is because I find myself thinking, “this won’t make any sense to people unless they know where I’m coming from.”

So hey, fuck it, let’s do this.

I went to college at the luckiest time

I left home when I was 15 years old. I left like a bottle rocket taking off – messy, explosive, a trail of destruction in my wake, and with absolutely zero targeting mechanisms.

It tells you a lot about how sheltered I was that the only place I could think of to go was university. I had never watched TV or been to a sports game or listened to popular music. I had never been to a doctor, I was quite unvaccinated.

I grew up in the backwoods of Idaho, the oldest of six, all of us homeschooled. I would go for weeks without seeing anyone other than my family. The only way to pass the time was by reading books or playing piano, so I did quite a lot of both. I called up the University of Idaho, asked for an admissions packet, hand wrote myself a transcript and gave myself all As, drove up and auditioned for the music department, and was offered a partial ride scholarship for classical piano performance.

I told my parents I was leaving, with or without their blessing or financial support. I left with neither.

My timing turned out to be flawless. I arrived on the cusp of the Internet age – they were wiring dorms for ethernet the year I enrolled. Maybe even more important, I arrived in the final, fading glory years of affordable state universities.

I worked multiple minimum wage jobs to put myself through school; day care, front desk, laundry, night audit. It was grueling, round the clock labor, but it was possible, if you were stubborn enough. I didn’t have a Social Security number (long story), I wasn’t old enough to take out loans, I couldn’t get financial aid because my parents didn’t file income taxes (again, long story). There was no help coming, I sank or I swam.

I found computers and the Internet around the same time as it dawned on me that everybody who studied music seemed to end up poor as an adult. I grew up too poor to buy canned vegetables or new underwear; we were like an 1800s family, growing our food, making our clothes, hand-me-downs til they fell apart.

Fuck being poor. Fuck it so hard. I was out.

I lost my music scholarship, but I started building websites and running systems for the university, then for local businesses. I dropped out and took a job in San Francisco. I went back, abortively; I dropped out again.

By the time I was 20 I was back in SF for good, making a salary five times what my father had made.

I grew up with a very coherent belief system that did not work for me

A lot of young people who flee their fundamentalist upbringing do so because they were abused and/or lost their faith, usually due to the hypocrisy of their leaders. Not me. I left home still believing the whole package – that evolution was a fraud, that the earth was created in seven days, that woman was created from Adam’s rib to be a submissive helpmate for their husband, that birth control was a sin, that anyone who believed differently was going to hell.

My parents loved us deeply and unshakably, and they were not hypocrites. In the places I grew up, the people who believed in God and went to church and lived a certain way were the ones who had their shit together, and the people who believed differently had broken lives. Reality seemed to confirm the truth of all we were taught, no matter how outlandish it sounds.

So I fully believed it was all true. I also knew it did not work for me. I did not want a small life. I did not want to be the support system behind some godly dude. I wanted power, money, status, fame, autonomy, success. I wanted to leave a crater in the world.

I was not a rebellious child, believe it or not. I loved my parents and wanted to make them proud. But as I entered my teens, I became severely depressed, and turned inward and hurt myself in all the ways young people do.

I left because staying there was killing me, and ultimately, I think my parents let me go because they saw it too.

Running away from things worked until it didn’t

I didn’t know what I wanted out of life other than all of it; right now, and my first decade out on my own was a hoot. It was in my mid twenties that everything started to fall apart.

I was an earnest kid who liked to study and think about the meaning of life, but when I bolted, I slammed the door to my conscience shut. I knew I was going to hell, but since I couldn’t live the other way, I made the very practical determination based on actuarial tables that I could to go my own way for a few decades, then repent and clean up my shit before I died. (Judgment Day was one variable that gave me heartburn, since it could come at any time.)

I was not living in accordance with my personal values and ethics, to put it lightly. I compartmentalized; it didn’t bother me, until it did. It started leaking into my dreams every night, and then it took over my waking life. I was hanging on by a thread; something had to give.

My way out, unexpectedly, started with politics. I started mainlining books about politics and economics during the Iraq War, which then expanded to history, biology, philosophy, other religious traditions, and everything else. (You can still find a remnant of my reading list here.)

When I was 13, I had an ecstatic religious experience; I was sitting in church, stewing over going to hell, and was suddenly filled with a glowing sense of warmth and acceptance. It lasted for nearly two weeks, and that’s how I knew I was “saved”.

In my late 20s, after a few years of intense study and research, I had a similar ecstatic experience walking up the stairs from the laundry room. I paused, I thought “maybe there is no God; maybe there is nobody out there judging me; maybe it all makes sense”, and it all clicked into place, and I felt high for days, suffused with peace and joy.

My career didn’t really take off until after that. I always had a job, but I wasn’t thinking about tech after hours. At first I was desperately avoiding my problems and self-medicating, later I became obsessed with finding answers. What did I believe about taxation, public policy, voting systems, the gender binary, health care, the whole messy arc of American history? I was an angry, angry atheist for a while. I filled notebook after notebook with handwritten notes; if I wasn’t working, I was studying.

And then, gradually, I wound down. The intensity, the high, tapered off. I started dating, realized I was poly and queer, and slowly chilled the fuck out. And that’s when I started being able to dedicate the creative, curious parts of my brain to my job in tech.

Why am I telling you all this?

Will Larson has talked a lot about how his underlying motivation is “advancing the industry”. I love that for him. He is such a structured thinker and prolific writer, and the industry needs his help, very badly.

For a while I thought that was my motivation too. And for sure, that’s a big part of it, particularly when it comes to observability and my day job. (Y’all, it does not need to be this hard. Modern observability is the cornerstone and prerequisite for high performing engineering teams, etc etc.)

But when I think about what really gets me activated on a molecular level, it’s a little bit different. It’s about living a meaningful life, and acting with integrity, and building things of enduring value instead of tearing them down.

When I say it that way, it sounds like sitting around on the mountain meditating on the meaning of life, and that is not remotely what I mean. Let me try again.

For me, work has been a source of liberation

It’s very uncool these days to love your job or talk about hard work. But work has always been a source of liberation for me. My work has brought me so much growth and development and community and friendship. It brings meaning to my life, and the joy of creation. I want this for myself. I want this for anyone else who wants it too.

I understand why this particular tide has turned. So many people have had jobs where their employers demanded total commitment, but felt no responsibility to treat them well or fairly in return. So many people have never experienced work as anything but a depersonalizing grind, or an exercise in exploitation, and that is heartbreaking.

I don’t think there’s anything morally superior about people who want their work to be a vehicle for personal growth instead of just a paycheck. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with just wanting a paycheck, or wanting to work the bare minimum to get by. But it’s not what I want for myself, and I don’t think I’m alone in this.

I feel intense satisfaction and a sense of achievement when I look back on my career. On a practical level, I’ve been able to put family members through college, help with down payments, and support artists in my community. All of this would have been virtually unimaginable to me growing up.

I worked a lot harder on the farm than I ever have in front of a keyboard, and got a hell of a lot less for my efforts.

(People who glamorize things like farming, gardening, canning and freezing, taking care of animals, cooking and caretaking, and other forms of manual labor really get under my skin. All of these things make for lovely hobbies, but subsistence labor is neither fun nor meaningful. Trust me on this one.)

My engineer/manager pendulum days

I loved working as an engineer. I loved how fast the industry changes, and how hard you have to scramble to keep up. I loved the steady supply of problems to fix, systems to design, and endless novel catastrophes to debug. The whole Silicon Valley startup ecosystem felt like it could not have been more perfectly engineered to supply steady drips of dopamine to my brain.

I liked working as an engineering manager. Eh, that might be an overstatement. But I have strong opinions and I like being in charge, and I really wanted more access to information and influence over decisions, so I pushed my way into the role more than once.

If Honeycomb hadn’t happened, I am sure I would have bounced back and forth between engineer and manager for the rest of my career. I never dreamed about climbing the ladder or starting a company. My attitude towards middle management could best be described as amiable contempt, and my interest in the business side of things was nonexistent.

I have always despised people who think they’re too good to work for other people, and that describes far too many of the founders I’ve met.

Operating a company draws on a different kind of meaning

I got the chance to start a company in 2016, so I took it, almost on a whim. Since then I have done so many things I never expected to do. I’ve been a founder, CEO, CTO, I’ve raised money, hired and fired other execs, run organizations, crafted strategy, and come to better understand and respect the critical role played by sales, marketing, HR, and other departments. No one is more astonished than I am to find me still here, still doing this.

But there is joy to be found in solving systems problems, even the ones that are less purely technical. There is joy to be found in building a company, or competing in a marketplace.

To be honest, this is not a joy that came to me swiftly or easily. I’ve been doing this for the past 9.5 years, and I’ve been happy doing it for maybe the past 2-3 years. But it has always felt like work worth doing. And ultimately, I think I’m less interested in my own happiness (whatever that means) than I am interested in doing work that feels worth doing.

Work is one of the last remaining places where we are motivated to learn from people we don’t agree with and find common pursuit with people we are ideologically opposed to. I think that’s meaningful. I think it’s worth doing.

Reality doesn’t give a shit about ideology

I am a natural born extremist. But when you’re trying to operate a business and win in the marketplace, ideological certainty crashes hard into the rocks of reality. I actually find this deeply motivating.

I spent years hammering out my own personal ontological beliefs about what is right and just, what makes a life worth living, what responsibilities we have to each another. I didn’t really draw on those beliefs very often as an engineer/manager, at least not consciously. That all changed dramatically after starting a company.

It’s one thing to stand off to the side and critique the way a company is structured and the decisions leaders make about compensation, structure, hiring/firing, etc. But creation is harder than critique (one of my favorite Jeff Gray quotes) — so, so, so much harder. And reality resists easy answers.

Being an adult, to me, has meant making peace with a multiplicity of narratives. The world I was born into had a coherent story and a set of ideals that worked really well for a lot of people, but it was killing me. Not every system works for every person, and that’s okay. That’s life. Startups aren’t for everyone, either.

The struggle is what brings your ideals to life

Almost every decision you make running a company has some ethical dimension. Yet the foremost responsibility you have to your stakeholders, from investors to employees, is to make the business succeed, to win in the marketplace. Over-rotating on ethical repercussions of every move can easily cause you to get swamped in the details and fail at your prime directive.

Sometimes you may have a strongly held belief that some mainstream business practice is awful, so you take a different path, and then you learn the hard way why it is that people don’t take that path. (This has happened to me more times than I can count. )

Ideals in a vacuum are just not that interesting. If I wrote an essay droning on and on about “leading with integrity”, no one would read it, and nor should they. That’s boring. What’s interesting is trying to win and do hard things, while honoring your ideals.

Shooting for the stars and falling short, innovating, building on the frontier of what’s possible, trying but failing, doing exciting things that exceed your hopes and dreams with a team just as ambitious and driven as you are, while also holding your ideals to heart — that’s fucking exciting. That’s what brings your ideals to life.

We have lived through the golden age of tech

I recognize that I have been profoundly lucky to be employed through the golden age of tech. It’s getting tougher out there to enter the industry, change jobs, or lead with integrity.

It’s a tough time to be alive, in general. There are macro scale political issues that I have no idea how to solve or fix. Wages used to rise in line with productivity, and now they don’t, and haven’t since the mid 70s. Capital is slurping up all the revenue and workers get an ever decreasing share, and I don’t know how to fix that, either.

But I don’t buy the argument that just because something has been touched by capitalism or finance it is therefore irreversibly tainted, or that there is no point in making capitalist institutions better. The founding arguments of capitalism were profoundly moral ones, grounded in a keen understanding of human nature. (Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” gets all the attention, but his other book, “Theory of Moral Sentiments”, is even better, and you can’t read one without the other.)

As a species we are both individualistic and communal, selfish and cooperative, and the miracle of capitalism is how effectively it channels the self-interested side of our nature into the common good.

Late stage capitalism, however, along with regulatory capture, enshittification, and the rest of it, has made the modern world brutally unkind to most people. Tech was, for a shining moment in time, a path out of poverty for smart kids who were willing to work their asses off. It’s been the only reliable growth industry of my lifetime.

It remains, for my money, the best job in the world. Or it can be. It’s collaborative, creative, and fun; we get paid scads of money to sit in front of a computer and solve puzzles all day. So many people seem to be giving up on the idea that work can ever be a place of meaning and collaboration and joy. I think that sucks. It’s too soon to give up! If we prematurely abandon tech to its most exploitative elements, we guarantee its fate.

If you want to change the world, go into business

Once upon a time, if you had strongly held ideals and wanted to change the world, you went into government or nonprofit work.

For better or for worse (okay, mostly worse), we live in an age where corporate power dominates. If you want to change the world, go into business.

The world needs, desperately, people with ethics and ideals who can win at business. We can’t let all the people who care about people go into academia or medicine or low wage service jobs. We can’t leave the ranks of middle and upper management to be filled by sycophants and sociopaths.

There’s nothing sinister about wanting power; what matters is what you do with it. Power, like capitalism, is a tool, and can be bent to powerful ends both good and evil. If you care about people, you should be unashamed about wanting to amass power and climb the ladder.

There are a lot of so-called best practices in this industry that are utterly ineffective (cough, whiteboarding B-trees in an interview setting), yet they got cargo culted and copied around for years. Why? Because the company that originated the practice made a lot of money. This is stupid, but it also presents an opportunity. All you need to do is be a better company, then make a lot of money.

People need institutions

I am a fundamentalist at heart, just like my father. I was born to be a bomb thrower and a contrarian, a thorn in the side of the smug moderate establishment. Unfortunately, I was born in an era where literally everyone is a fucking fundamentalist and the establishment is holding on by a thread.

I’ve come to believe that the most quietly radical, rebellious thing I can possibly do is to be an institutionalist, someone who builds instead of performatively tearing it all down.

People need institutions. We crave the feeling of belonging to something much larger than ourselves. It’s one of the most universal experiences of our species.

One of the reasons modern life feels so fragmented and hard is because so many of our institutions have broken down or betrayed the people they were supposed to serve. So many of the associations that used to frame our lives and identities — church, government, military, etc — have tolerated or covered up so much predatory behavior and corruption, it no longer surprises anyone.

We’ve spent the past few decades ripping down institutions and drifting away from them. But we haven’t stopped wanting them, or needing them.

I hope, perhaps naively, that we are entering into a new era of rebuilding, sadder but wiser. An era of building institutions with accountability and integrity, institutions with enduring value, that we can belong to and take pride in… not because we were coerced or deceived, not because they were the only option, but because they bring us joy and meaning. Because we freely choose them, because they are good for us.

The second half of your career is about purpose

It seems very normal to enter the second half of your 40 year career thinking a lot about meaning and purpose. You spend the first decade or so hoovering up skill sets, the second finding your place and what feeds you, and then, inevitably, you start to think about what it all means and what your legacy will be.

That’s definitely where I’m at, as I think about the second half of my career. I want to take risks. I want to play big and win bigger. I want to show that hard work isn’t just a scam inflicted on those who don’t know any better. If we win, I want the people I work with to earn lifechanging amounts of money, so they can buy homes and send their kids to college. I want to show that work can still be an avenue for liberation and community and personal growth, for those of us who still want that.

I care about this industry and the people in it so much, because it’s been such a gift to me. I want to do what I can to make it a better place for generations to come. I want to build institutions worth belonging to.

I want the ideals I care about to become associated with success. I want people to cargo cult them and spread them throughout the industry, even if they don’t necessarily understand why. I think that companies that practice transparency can be better companies. I think that leaders held accountable can be better leaders. Let’s go and prove it.

---

The heat is what strikes you first. The morning is still young, barely eleven, but the sun scorches where it hits. All around you the tide of humanity floats in a brownian motion. The largest tents and the most colourful are those that promise food. Tacos, pizza, margaritas, deep friend oreos on a stick, cheesy fries and non cheesy fries. There is candy everywhere, in all colours and flavours and sizes.

There are children, but the children are somehow outnumbered by the adults, some of whom seem to be there with the children. I’ve gone with family and friends, four kids in total, ages 2 to 7. 3:4 adult ratio. And maybe a third of the overall visitors are youth? It’s higher than the national average, but it’s still far lower than what one might naively expect.

The people around are a microcosm of the country. You can hear all sorts of accents. There’s a dad with three daughters getting angry irrationally at them for asking for something. He’s wearing a black singlet and tattooed all over. There’s a family with grandma and three young elementary school age kids, and they’re bargaining over the toys they each got. There’s an Indian family busily tucking into a whole table full of stuff they bought. The dad’s inexplicably eating a tub of popcorn himself. The couple who are clearly on a date, she’s laughing at his jokes, he’s laughing at his own jokes, drinking a giant cup of blue.

Every inch of space around promises happiness. Each toy, each multicoloured ride, each game, all of them.

The core fact that one notices about fairs is that they are the final boss of capitalism. Once you enter you enter into a captive world. Every experience is mediated to be the perfect buyable representation of something you want, but in its inner hyde-esque distilled sense. Sells you ‘id’, attracts you with colours and lights. It's a place where money ceases to have any meaning. They design it so, you are meant to convert money into tickets, and then do the maths on those tickets, so you have to do rather complex maths if you want to figure out how to maximise your “fun”. Do I believe I will take 3 rides? 5? 10? What about games? And if so does it make sense to spend $20 for 17 tickets, when the average ride takes 4-5 tickets, depending on the rise, or should I take the addition to spend also on 2 games? The full package or the summation of two middling ones? How much will I actually like these? Should I swap my enjoyment from this ride for that game?

And then do the maths again for your kids. You can ask them, and they'll give you a response too, but can you trust the response? You make sure. Four, seven, ten year olds standing around while their parents try and do differential equations with plugged in utility numbers to figure out what’s the right amount to spend.

But you don't need to worry. The little booths stand around like small purple cartoon-emblazoned ATMs ubiquitous to the point you cannot ever make the excuse of not having enough tickets to get a ride for your child.

The food is everywhere. Pungent but preserved so it stays in the sun. Carefully crafted to give you the impression of indulgence, with none of the consideration for quality, or nutrition, much less taste. The pizza slices are inside hot boxes but are inexplicably room temperature. Too much cheese, runny tomato sauce that is processed enough that it has lost the taste of tomato, and crust thick enough to fill any stomach. A slice of pizza the price of a whole pizza. A pizza-esque experience, at least, if not with the succour a pizza slice demands. You pay for being able to carry a slice with you, it cannot bend nor break, and the portability premium easily supplants the edibility discount.

Is $10 for a cup of coffee too much? A mile to the left or right that would be robbery, double the price with tip, but here? No. You’re paying for the ambience, or the location, or something. For the convenience of being able to go to a corner shop and get the same coffee from the same machine manned by the same disinterested teenager.

And why would he be interested? I look around and I can feel myself getting satiated, can you imagine working here? To feel your neurons get numb at the sight of fried cheese and mozzarella balls, with families fighting to decide who will spend that last token at the game where you throw a little ball into a frog’s mouth to win a stuffed teddy they will forget in a week?

Despite the abundance there is scarce variety. You're hedonically adjusted all the way up. You can only compare the joy of this against the experience of everything else outside the fair in your life but if you work there the memories fade. They must.

A long time ago I went on a cruise, only for a day, in Scandinavia. It was for work (really), and it was the most extraordinarily boring day I’ve spent anywhere, despite being tailor made to satisfy human desire. Something about the extreme convenience and mediocre imitations of everything you might like, together in a shopping mall, seemed to be a mockery of our existence. It’s like the proprietors did an equation - what’s the lowest quality people will agree to consume for our food, music, art or pool hygiene, against what’s the most we can get away with charging them.

I get it. That’s exactly the equation to be maximised. But when “exit” is no longer an option, as you’re floating in the open ocean, you realise the equilibrium price is dramatically lower than what it would’ve been on land.

And shorn of the need for any actual effort, since the pool and casino and observation deck and comedy cellar and jazz lounge are all in walking distance carefully calibrated to seem short to even those on walkers, one ends up feeling a weird form of ennui. A feeling of “is this all there is to life”? You look at others smiling and laughing and feel ever so slightly jealous.

The children wait in line for rides far more patiently than they have ever waited for anything else. But the distinction between the rides are blurred, when you ask them.

“Did you enjoy riding the boat?”

“Yes, it was fun.”

“Was it more fun than the rotating bears?”

“That was also fun.”

And so on. I am somewhat in awe of the creators here. The machines, and these are machines, help swing, rotate and shake with confidence. They sound like a washing machine ready for repair but the groans are ignored in a form of consensual hallucination and a belief in civil society that's unheard of in other realms of modern life. We don't even suffer schools like this. This is trust, trust in the system.

I looked up what certifications a fairground ride has to go through. There are annual inspections and permits and all forms of documentation of accidents and maintence that’s needed. California isn’t shy about regulating. They must have insurance to. Reading up later I learn that there are multiple committees and standards - NAARSO and AIMS for ride inspectors and operators. And compliance with ASTM. Of course Cal/ OSHA. Title 8. It’s not easy, it would seem, because there are 50 rides, occasionally varying, sometimes more, but enough to require capital M management.

I wonder idly how much money they might have made. I can’t help it, businesses are businesses. If you have ten thousand people visiting, and a third are children, many of whom ride and many of whom will buy the $45 ticket, they might well make up to $100-200k a day. More on weekends.

I can’t easily tell if it’s good. It sure is a lot of effort to go through! The fairgrounds itself is around 270 acres. There are maybe a hundred rides and game booths. Probably more. And then there is food and shopping. Many of them seem small, selling sombreros and so on.. There are a thousand or fifteen hundred workers. When you look at it like that, the $100-200k a day seem not that impressive. It’s a hard way to make money, but then they all are.

There was a circus we went to see not that long ago. Venardi circus. They explained why the name earlier but I forgot the reason. But even as a small circus touring the east bay it had exceptional acrobats. Some more than a few generations in the circus life. I thought the same then, as they swung above us and twirled impossibly, how much effort is needed to get good at this, and how little society actually values it.

The reason I keep thinking about this is not that the economics are fascinating, though they are, but the overwhelming feeling I get from fairs is to find a quiet place in the shade and to have a beer.

That too is in offer at the fair. In fact, that’s inescapable. There are stands everywhere selling beer and lemonade and large cups of blue whose names I forget. The beer is also an emblem, not of beer per se but the existence of beer, because having one on a warm day as a form of respite provides respite even above the beverage itself.

My kids end up wanting to go to a Professor Science show. He asks questions, they know some of the answers. “What’s the name of the large telescope orbiting the earth?” he asks. My seven year old turns to me and asks, “Galileo?”. The logic is correct, the knowledge however isn't there yet. “Hubble,” I tell him. I’m sure he’ll remember Hubble though, I first remember learning about it in a similar fashion, when my dad told me about it. The new oral tradition.

(I also told him about cavitation, I’m not sure why, because it happens when I crack my knuckles, about mantis shrimp, and the apocryphal tail whips of apatosaurs also causing the phenomenon.)

But the scientist, an older gentleman assisted by his wife of forty four years, shows more props. My attention drifts. They get a gang of kids together, get them to break a lightbulb by screaming standing together in a semicircle. They make anodyne jokes, “your parents must be so proud.” The audience laughs.

We go back to the rides. There’s a small rollercoaster shaped like a dragon, riding in a lopsided figure 8. The kids seem to love it, some of them even try to take their hands up while the whiplash makes their necks wobble. Did they enjoy it? Yes, they say.

Next they go to one that does the same as the rotating multi-coloured bears but in multicoloured helicopters.

Why do they all look and feel the same? Ferris-wheel, boom-flipper (Zipper), spinning drum (Gravitron), tilt-platform, Himalaya oval. I imagine it has to do with the fact that fairs aren’t permanent. They evolved into the sizes that would allow maximum enjoyment but can be “folded up” and transported on a trailer to the next fair. It also can’t be too complex, the workers know the machines but they’re not experts. And they have to pass inspections, which means building things that the inspectors know how to pass.

Convergent evolution is at work here. The rotating swings are like the eyes of the natural world, showing up again and again because it’s the best fit functionally to satisfy the csontraints. Which is also why there aren’t that many suppliers. I learn that there are only three - Chance RIdes which makes the Zipper type coasters. Wisdom Rides making Gravitrons and Himalayas. And a few international ones - Zamperla and Fabbri from Italy, KMG from Netherlands - which make up most of the portable ride market.

And because there are only a few suppliers, the only way to stand out is to add more colours, more art. Like motorheads painting their cars with fire. The carnivals buy them from each other, re-skin them, add more LEDs, different colours, an inevitable trend towards complete garish oversaturation of the visible spectrum until the entire eyeline is covered in neon in several hues of red and yellow and orange. The fact that this is a small market, highly incestuous, where everyone wants to reuse everything shows up in the extreme mundanity of what we all see. They look the same because they literally are the same, just new coats of paint to trick the eyes.

The diversity comes entirely from the things around the rides and the food and the games. Or rather, those sources of diversity exist, whether or not they actually succeed. The music stands set up at regular intervals where local bands can play cover songs from the eighties and nineties that evokes nostalgia for the parents and apathy for the kids.

Professor Science was one of those, though in the United States success breeds replication so now there are Professors of Science across multiple fairs. He too sells a little backscratcher looking thing for five dollars that has an optical illusion at the back of it. Promising a short exploration of the optical system within kids but mostly destined to end up at the bottom of a toybox, as part of a short but fascinating life of a low priced mass manufactured mini toy.

The existence of a form of entertainment has transformed into a beautifully stylized supply chain, a few suppliers who build a few machines that pass inspection, and seemingly a caste of people who think of this as their whole way of life. Occasionally maybe a new game or ride breaks out, or a new cuisine, but by and large this seems an invariant source of entertainment across the ages. With the addition now being of the items on offer squeezed to their ultimate essence, of separating capital from its owners with maximum alacrity. Every trick in the book applied simultaneously.

The biggest attraction though was courtesy of the local pet shop. A large hall filled with animals. Perhaps it came at the end, but perhaps because of what it was. Kids yearn to be with animals. Bunnies, geckos, snakes, birds, turtles, some hissing cockroaches, and pygmy goats. You could touch them, play with them, and of course buy them!

To me it provided a brief respite from the sun. The hall had benches the adults can sit on, to rest from the extreme calf pain only brought about by slowly walking around and occasionally standing.

The detritus of people continues to float in all directions. There are more people, there are also more stationary forms under the shades of trees and awnings. It’s past noon, there’s food everywhere.

We walk out before we melt. The kids are tuckered out from the rides physically but not mentally, every new with is a promise that this one's amazing and even if it looks the same as the old ones they pull on the little heartstrings, holding kitschy toys that they'll forget in a day (they did!) and passing a larger group of people walking in.

The tumult is the attraction. Individually each aspect seems dull, even banal, the same thing one has seen a thousand times over in any lifetime, but together they create a space that invites you to create your own reality. “This is fun” they say, and in saying so repeatedly and liberally try to get you to agree with them. After all, what’s not fun about a rollercoaster at 11 am followed by a cheesy medium-warm hot dog and then a cold beer? Isn’t this the very goal of life?

The metal and plastic are hot but the ridership isn’t down. Kids and couples are still queuing up to go up the dragon and down the misshapen ships. They don’t seem to mind the heat.

“WhatsApp increases group chat size limit to oddly specific 256”