The Curious Engineer

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Hopeful Monsters

hopefulmons.com

Culture, technology, and other macromutations. Click to read Hopeful Monsters, by Étienne Fortier-Dubois, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalHistoryAI / MLSociety / politics / economy

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
243 from 18 Nov 2020 to 24 Oct 2026
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monthly (18 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 13

  1. Yes, AI Destroyed the Planet, but for a Beautiful Moment in Time We Created a Lot of Amazing Vibecoded Personal Websites
  2. Two-List Model of Masculinity and Femininity
  3. There Is No Reason to Ever Choose the MM/DD/YYYY Date Format
  4. Imagine That Carthage Had Won
  5. Pre-Watch Review of ‘The Odyssey’
  6. Who Were the Original Monsters in “Now Is the Time of Monsters”?
  7. Reality Is Joking About U
  8. Spring 2026 Tech Tree Updates
  9. Noticing the Beauty in Ads, Commerce, and Capitalism
  10. Middle Age(s)
  11. What Are Your Guilty Displeasures?
  12. Reflections From Leading the Board of a Small Music Nonprofit
  13. The Sun When It Is Behind Translucent Clouds, Pale, Moon-Like, and Painless to Gaze Upon

2025 20

  1. Full Saturation
  2. The Capitals of the G7 Countries, Ranked
  3. Atlas of Links #3
  4. Book Review: Mozart the Performer
  5. Electoral Choice from the Point of View of the Ethical Trinity
  6. We Need Polycentric Cultures of Progress
  7. Cultural Evolution Works in Not-So-Mysterious Yet Often Misunderstood Ways
  8. An Adventure in Smoke Detection
  9. The Color of the Future
  10. Why Did Nobody Tell Me ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Was This Good
  11. Tech Tree Updates and Similar Projects
  12. Experiment: The Mystery of Blue Raspberry Flavor
  13. No, we shouldn't return to the climate of the 18th century
  14. Introducing the Historical Tech Tree
  15. Atlas of Links #2
  16. Multi-country civilizations are good, actually
  17. From the vault: King of fruits
  18. Deep Into the Depths
  19. Make America a Continent Again
  20. Atrophy of the Writing Muscle

2024 47

  1. A Substack Sabbatical
  2. Notes From the Periphery on the Recent Election in the Empire
  3. Living on the Periphery of the Empire
  4. Hopeful monsters
  5. Karl Popper’s Theory of Evolution
  6. Atlas of Links #1
  7. Histories of the Greater West
  8. Meta-Meta-Meta-Contrarian Woke
  9. The Great Showdown!! History vs. Science Fiction
  10. Sacred Hydro
  11. Never Index Your Own Blog
  12. Joining Elicit
  13. Poetic Prose on Evil, Written on the Occasion of Having Purchased a Venus Flytrap
  14. Beauty as the Original Solution to the Alignment Problem
  15. Progress and Degrowth in the Rock Opera ‘Starmania’
  16. The Enduring Prestige of Belle Époque Institutions
  17. The First Culture Warriors
  18. Four Ages of the Olympic Ideal
  19. Love More Than You Can Keep Track Of
  20. Mythical Wealth-Creation Machines
  21. Libertarianism With the Cultural Exception
  22. Sun Worship So Intense It Disrupts the Entire Country
  23. How to Win an ACX Book Review Contest
  24. The Elusive Three-Paragraph Essay
  25. Doom Is Too Simple
  26. Against Against Food Waste
  27. I Prefer When Life Is Excruciatingly Meaningful
  28. Sketches for a Philosophy Machine
  29. Is Storytelling Getting Better Over Time?
  30. The Watchmaker Analogy Argues, at Most, for Polytheism
  31. AI Alignment With Almost No Jargon
  32. An Uncommonly Cited Reason to Colonize the Stars
  33. Occasionally Scheduled Reminder That You Live on One of Several Celestial Bodies Dancing Together
  34. Travel Notes From the Most Beautiful Hospital in the World
  35. The Unbearable Simplicity of Dystopia
  36. How Expensive Is Architectural Ornamentation?
  37. More Men Made of Miscellaneous Materials
  38. Trapped Among the Root Causes
  39. The 29th, and Other Calendar Quirks
  40. The Forgotten Capital
  41. Crushing It
  42. The Most Nuanced Take You Will Ever Read About Sparta (and North Korea)
  43. Crashing Into Something or Someone, Perhaps Repeatedly and Only for Fun
  44. Me and My AI Ugh Field
  45. There Is No Planet B (For Worldbuilding)
  46. Reclaiming Cornucopianism
  47. The Snob and the Pollyanna

2023 52

  1. End-of-Year Self-Congratulatory Gala
  2. A Meaning of Christmas
  3. One Thousand and One Notes on ‘One Thousand and One Nights’
  4. Your System of Ethics Needs a Line of Retreat
  5. It Turns Out Anger Isn’t Great For Writing Blog Posts
  6. Ethics and the Complexity of Models
  7. Children of the Geissler Tube
  8. The Figurative-to-Abstract Art Pipeline
  9. Three European Cemeteries
  10. Dark Age Ahead: A Lukewarm Book Review
  11. AI as Sparkly Magic
  12. Holy Land
  13. What Counts as a Technology?
  14. Can Our Civilization Build Beautiful Hospitals?
  15. 1980s Jane Jacobs on Cities, States, and City-States
  16. A Song of Proto-Industrialization
  17. Two New Ways for the French to Be Smug About Food
  18. Family Curses Are Real
  19. You Can't Overuse the Word ‘Friend’
  20. In Defense of Tech Trees
  21. Toronto as Utopia
  22. Crazy Science Idea: Tell People Something Is Possible When You Actually Have No Clue
  23. I Wrote Half a Book About Phantom Islands and Then Discovered I Was Scooped Seven Years Ago
  24. French 1790s Disco, and Other Excesses
  25. Please Plagiarize This Blog Post
  26. When the Ugliness of the Problem Sticks to the Solution
  27. The Opposite of Squishy Is Ghostly
  28. We Rarely Lose Technology
  29. So Long, Classical Futurist!
  30. My Left Shoulder Blade Is Possessed By a Minor Demon
  31. No But Really, Why Are Flowers Beautiful?
  32. Ruins Everywhere and Nowhere
  33. Things I Learned From Ranking 1000 Historical Rulers
  34. Chinese Noodles, Swedish Tacos, and Other Authenticity Puzzles
  35. Somehow I Trust the Flip-Floppers More
  36. Nothing More Powerful Than the Anti-Cultishness Cult
  37. What Will I Find in San Francisco?
  38. Charting a Course of Study in Neuroaesthetics
  39. A Techno-Historical Analogy in Which YOU Are the Hero
  40. Pre-Nostalgia in the Late Pre-AI Era
  41. Scientific Writing Is a Miserable Grind, So Let's Outsource It to AI
  42. on low effort
  43. Does Weather Affect Mood, And Separately, Does Climate Affect Happiness?
  44. The Inevitable, Awkward Post About Money
  45. Tricks to Slow Time Down
  46. Nothing Is Inherently Obvious
  47. In Praise of Being a Tourist
  48. Preamble to a Psychofauna Bestiary
  49. All Video Games Are Set in Winter
  50. The Strawman, the Steelman, and the Gold-Plated Man
  51. Yes, I Judge Books by their Cover
  52. Is Hard Work Virtuous?

2022 52

  1. This Blog Considered as a Cabinet of Curiosities
  2. Why Do I Feel Inadequate at Coming Up With Research Ideas?
  3. The Overfit Theory of Everything
  4. All Slopes Are Slippery, Also None of Them Are Actually Slopes
  5. Adventures in Finetuning Stable Diffusion
  6. Infinitely Many New Pages from the Mexican Codex Borgia
  7. The Vibes Are Off
  8. Bad News Is Good News
  9. Our Intuitions About Non-Existence Are Pretty Terrible
  10. The End of Infinity
  11. Behind the Scenes of ‘Write 100 Posts’
  12. Portrait of the Blogger in a Tangle of Links of His Own Making
  13. The Total Value of Art Stays Constant Over Time
  14. On (Not) Writing About Politics Online
  15. Reinvent the Wheel
  16. Things Always Seem to Get Worse, Always Have, Always Will
  17. Why Is ‘Nature’ Prestigious?
  18. One Technology to Rule Them All
  19. How to Slow Down Progress (According to Fiction)
  20. Aesthetics as Epistemic Humility
  21. Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards
  22. Prompt Engineering for Humans
  23. Hieroglyphic Notes on the Most Important Century, Etched Into the Stone of a Long-Sealed Tomb
  24. One-Day Research Projects
  25. Effective-ish Altruism
  26. Breakup Letter to a Once Beloved Project
  27. The Industrial Revolution That Almost Was
  28. The Four Shapes of History
  29. The Case Against Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Education
  30. Remaining Ambitious
  31. A Visit to the Idea Machine Fair
  32. We Can Do Better Than Miracles
  33. Retrofuturism Is Futurism Done Well
  34. The Two Most Tragic Moments in History
  35. The Secret of Happiness Is That There Are Three Kinds
  36. Do Not Befriend the Problem—Slay It
  37. The Difference Between Science and the Humanities Is Reading the Classics
  38. A Taxonomy of Beauty
  39. Five Propositions on the Future of Art
  40. A General Philosophy of Being Dazzlingly Alive
  41. More People Means More Good
  42. Evil Is Just Emptiness
  43. Book Review: ‘The Sense of Style’
  44. Impressions of Austin
  45. On Moving Dirt Around
  46. ‘The Power of Myth’: A Book Review
  47. Progress Positivity in the ‘Civilization’ Games
  48. Meditation on the Future
  49. Awareness Is the Secret Sauce of Everything Good
  50. Bad Attempts at Simplification Rule Everything Around Me
  51. Don't Spend Your Life Building Rube Goldberg Machines
  52. Yet Another Piece of Commentary About “Don't Look Up”

2021 52

  1. How Many Words Have You Ever Written?
  2. My Weirdest Year Yet
  3. Seven Salons About Ted Chiang
  4. Paint With the Colors That Don't Exist
  5. Is It Worth Fixing Science?
  6. On the Proper Use of the Moon
  7. Reality Will Become a Status Symbol
  8. The Unsolvable Puzzle of Modern Architecture
  9. Here Be Dragons, But Also Dazzling Marvels
  10. Rabbit Hole #10: Anosmia
  11. Rabbit Hole #9: Texas
  12. Rabbit Hole #8: Non-Fungible Tokens
  13. Rabbit Hole #7: The Ethereum White Paper
  14. Rabbit Hole #6: The Blockchain
  15. Rabbit Hole #5: DAOs
  16. Rabbit Hole #4: Dishwashers
  17. Rabbit Hole #3: Building a New Capital for Your Country Because the Old Capital Is 'Too Crowded'
  18. Rabbit Hole #2: Vaporwave
  19. Rabbit Hole #1 — The Twentieth Century, Seen from the Nineteenth Century
  20. Rabbit Hole #0 — A Redesign and an Introduction
  21. Hello I Am on a Break 2
  22. Hello I Am on a Break
  23. What is the Most Important Problem in the World?
  24. A Timeline of Semi-Random Historical Facts
  25. The Four-Way Tradeoff of the Writer
  26. The First Third and the First Half
  27. The Value of Variety: Values and Morality
  28. The Value of Variety: Politics
  29. The Value of Variety: Random Systems
  30. The Value of Variety: Daily Life
  31. The Value of Variety: Human Identities
  32. The Value of Variety: Culture and Language
  33. The Value of Variety: Biodiversity
  34. Breathing Soul into History
  35. The Dance of Novelty and Comfort
  36. On Uniformity
  37. A Pilot Study of Pokémon Biodiversity
  38. Let Me Prove a Point Using Colored Dots
  39. A Diversity of Diversities
  40. My Newsletter is Like a Rat
  41. The Strangeness of Writing an Autobiography
  42. The IQ Bell Curve Meme
  43. It's Okay to Know the Story Beforehand
  44. Editing Adulthood
  45. Learning to Stop Worrying and Love my Laptop
  46. Why Beauty?
  47. How to Give Advice and How to Receive It
  48. A Tower to Reach Heaven
  49. Unleash the Niche
  50. Crossing Deserts and Progress Bars
  51. The Evolution of My Evolutionary Thinking
  52. Made of 100% Local Organic Culture

2020 7

  1. My Journey as a Writer on Friendship
  2. Find Your Metaphorical Cheerleaders
  3. The Quest to Find Your People
  4. Becoming Ambitious
  5. To Write Multitudes
  6. Just Do It Once, Then Repeat
  7. A Very Unassuming Launch