Dan Hinze

This post slowly devolved from a third straight weekly notes to biweekly notes to "whenever I feel ready to" notes. ICE's murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, along with their continued presence in the Twin Cities for a seemingly interminable time, made daily life incredibly tense, exhausting, and enraging. As growing national (and even global) outrage widened the scope of protests, it was hard to capture for others the feeling of what it's like being here in Minneapolis. This entire piece from The Atlantic is worth reading, but there are a few specific parts that resonated for me:

If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from...Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.

If I could take any one idea and bottle it up, it would be that: people looking out for one another simply because it's the right thing to do.

The amount of organizing has been incredible to see. It seems that this is an outgrowth of infrastructure that was established in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. Mutual aid communities formed and skills honed in the summer of 2020 have not disappeared, and so when such a critical time of need arose, they were ready, not only from a distribution perspective but also to absorb such a large influx of donations. While risk tolerance varies and not everyone is comfortable protesting or observing agents, anyone can donate groceries and toiletries to parties in need without a sense of personal endangerment. With so many people asking "how can I help?", this distributed network was abundant and prepared.

As of a couple days ago, ICE says they're leaving, or at least scaling back office numbers to levels prior to what DHS has called Operation Metro Surge. I'll believe it when I see it. Their hyper-visible presence in recent weeks has shrunk, but evil being less overt is still evil. Even if they actually do leave, it's not like they're gone for good; they'll just go terrorize a different place with similar tactics. This episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver was 6 months ago and was about as prescient as it could be:

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I'll leave you with the powerful closing words of the same article, although I'm not ready to adopt as hopeful of a tone. As long as institutions like ICE exist, more violations of our civil rights will be perpetuated. Laws will continue to be broken by those purportedly upholding them. Constitutional rights will be ignored. Nonetheless, the collective ethos inspiring this passage rings true:

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

ICE's tactics will shift, but so will the forms of speaking truth to power. It's been a long start to 2026, but I've never been prouder to call Minneapolis my home.

Jasmine Sun's newsletter, self-described as "an anthropology of disruption...essays on AI and Silicon Valley culture" has become a regular read for me. With AI inundating every corner of tech, along with an increasing percentage of the public discourse, Jasmine's writing helps provide a perspective on what the culture around tech and AI feels like in the place where so much of the consequential activity is happening. For me, it helps provide some insight into questions like:

• What do the people actually building these tools think about them?
• How do they live?
• What is their worldview, and how does that shape how they approach their work?
• Is this just the next iteration of "move fast and break things" in an arms race between a handful of companies?

Her recent post, though, irked me a little bit, as it sought to see how another sphere of influence, the political environs of Washington, D.C., is viewing AI. Admittedly, some of my reaction boils down to what I'll call "flyover country complex." As a lifelong Midwesterner, I often find the dominance of the coasts in the national discourse to fall somewhere on a spectrum of mildly annoying to infuriatingly tone-deaf, depending on the writer and the topic. While so much of the progress in AI is seemingly confined to such a small geographic area, its ultimate success relies on a broad adoption outside of the epicenters that believe in its potential most fervently. For now, I haven't seen that same belief reflected in my own circles.

On AI skepticism and critiques external to the Bay Area, Jasmine writes:

To be clear, I’m not interested in blanket bans on data centers or chatbots. But I better understand why people feel such conviction in hating AI. Silicon Valley loves to design for success cases, asking, how good could things get? They point to the autodidact, the vibecode millionaire, a glowing future of immortality and infinite leisure too. That monomaniacal optimism is my favorite thing about tech. But the distribution has a downside, and we can’t ignore it. Whether in lawsuits or regulation, the bill will come due.

Monomaniacal optimism might be useful in seeing things come to fruition, but a downside of this approach is a dismissiveness towards addressing legitimate risks and harms. While everyone in the industry seems to acknowledge a lack of solutions to the myriad of potential downstream consequences in AI's expanding footprint, they also seem too preoccupied to actually prioritize doing anything about it:

You’d think that the pandemic might’ve taught us a lesson about public preparedness, but friends at the labs tell me there’s no time to deal with policy or assuage decel concerns. Most researchers have no good answers on the future of jobs, education, and relationships; even as they earnestly sympathize with the harms. They know they should, of course. They donate, publish research, say what they can. But everything is Just. Too. Fast.

Tucked into the conclusion of Jasmine's piece is an acknowledgment of some bias that I think merits some scrutiny:

...In both places, everyone asks how to do things and rarely wonders should.

Critics say that people in SF and DC cannot just be, feel, live. But I find the tryhard sincerity charming because I am like that too. Over drinks, I muse, What has New York created for the rest of the world? and my Berliner friend retorts, That’s such an SF question to ask. I think it’s a good question, actually, but concede that it’s grandiose. SF and DC are monocultural low-taste cities for nerds who want to rule the world.

What has the largest city in the US and arguably the cultural capital of the world created for the rest of the world? The myopia of this musing, even if it's just a throwaway comment, reinforces the idea of the pedestal that SF entrepreneurs and founders are put on, even when they're selling snake oil.

While this piece was chiefly concerned with the comparison of SF vs DC, I wish it would have spent some more time contemplating the figurative, and literal geographic, middle: the rest of the population that these tools are actually being marketed to.

You only need to go as far as the slew of AI ads throughout last weekend's Super Bowl to see that the messaging for the masses is not particularly compelling. AI slop nightmare fuel to sell vodka? Pretending like Gemini making basic photoshop edits is as inspiring as Toy Story? It's no wonder why people are tired of this crap, with underwhelming examples of LLM's "creativity" that feel soulless. The material impact of these technologies on many people's day-to-day lives still feels more like an intrusion than a breakthrough.

The mistake the marketing continues to make is thinking that we don't want to do anything for ourselves. Outsource everything to the AI, because that definitely won't make people anxious about job security. Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor doing a lot of great research studying AI's impacts on work and education, reminds us in his newsletter post "Against Brain Damage" that these tools are best utilized when they're augmenting us, not replacing us (emphasis mine):

AI doesn't damage our brains, but unthinking use can damage our thinking. What's at stake isn't our neurons but our habits of mind. There is plenty of work worth automating or replacing with AI (we rarely mourn the math we do with calculators), but also a lot of work where our thinking is important. For these problems, the research gives us a clear answer. If you want to keep the human part of your work: think first, write first, meet first.

Our fear of AI “damaging our brains” is actually a fear of our own laziness. The technology offers an easy out from the hard work of thinking, and we worry we'll take it. We should worry. But we should also remember that we have a choice.

Your brain is safe. Your thinking, however, is up to you.

I've made some small strides in my woodworking goals in the last year, mostly in the form of building some raised garden beds. This desire to improve my DIY skills is great, though getting started is often the most overwhelming part for me. I prefer more structure to initially learn, so taking a general intro to woodshop at my local Woodcraft store ended up being a great use of a recent weekend. Everyone in the class made a charcuterie board and a little keepsake box.

In the process, I got a lot more practice with a table saw, a bandsaw, and other miscellaneous tools (jointer, planer, spindle sander, etc). The bandsaw was completely new to me, and using it to make the undulating curves of my charcuterie board was almost meditative.

The weather's not quite to the point of making garage woodworking viable, but I'm looking forward to building out more of a home shop in the spring. The eventual goal is to build more cabinetry and furniture, but I'll probably start with a basic bookshelf or an outdoor sofa; something simple but doable.

Industry is filling the gap left by Succession in my TV viewing. One of the show's strengths is its ability to effectively communicate the stakes of a situation without compromising on jargon. I know next to nothing about financial trading, but the writing and acting is so good that I don't really need to understand the specifics to still get wrapped up in the drama of it all. That being said, I should probably actually learn how shorting and futures and [insert any other of the many trading terms dropped in this show] actually work.

The Pitt remains appointment viewing for Anwen and me. This season hasn't quite captured the magic of the first yet, but it's close enough that I can't really be disappointed yet. Formulaic weekly shows are popular for a reason!

In trying to reduce the friction in starting to make things, I've cleaned the music corner of my office and finally taken some steps to fool around in Ableton. I don't really know what I'm doing yet, but recording song ideas inside a DAW and not just in voice memos feels like a small step in the right direction. I'm hoping to lean into learning more drum programming techniques and basic synthesis as a springboard into exploring more ambient and trance styles.

Whenever someone asks me how people get through the winters in Minnesota, the Art Shanty Projects on Lake Harriet are a great example to point to as an embodiment of a certain ethos here: with the right clothes and attitude, cold isn't a barrier to silly fun stuff. Frozen lakes can be used for more than just hockey and ice fishing.