• Elmer of Malmesbury (pseud.): My journey to the microwave alternate timeline. What if the microwave oven hadn’t been associated with reheating frozen TV dinners and instead became the go-to appliance for all kinds of cooking?
• Jessica Hullman: Everything I ever needed to know in life I learned from the men in the Epstein files. What if scumbags gave life lessons?
• Bryan Vartabedian: The Fungibility of Doctors. What if American physicians willingly gave away their autonomy and sleepwalked into being cogs in a machine?
• Venkatesh Rao: New Ferality. What if you couldn’t escape the machine even if you tried?
• Delanoe Pirard: Science Judged by Ghosts: 21% of Peer Reviews Are Now AI. What if my prediction starts becoming true?

🍿 Any Given Sunday (1999) is a pro sports movie that doesn’t mention the Internet and barely recognizes gambling. What a difference 27 years make.

🍿 Urchin (2025) was a decent anti-drug movie, but why the overblown praise for Harris Dickinson as a first-time director? Kudos for steadying the camera and not going too close into people’s faces, I guess.

23 hours after receiving an email from someone US-based: “Dear Milos, I still haven’t heard back from you so I wanted to bring it back to the top of your inbox…”

3 days after responding to someone from Europe, 7 days after their initial email: “Dear Dr. Miljković, thank you for your quick reply…”

Dreaming in Code is the story of the first three years in the life of the ultimately doomed Chandler, a project that started as a larger-than-life rethink of how computers handle information and ended up as an open-source desktop calendar client at a time when mobile and web apps started taking over the world. In that it was quite similar to the story of Vertex which, admittedly, had a much better financial outcome for those involved.

Rosenberg managed to tick a lot of my personal interest boxes, from handling big projects through discussing the rise of David Allen’s Getting Things Done to talks of recursion and Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops. He ends the book with a reminder of the very first Long Bet made in 2002 between the man behind Chandler, Mitch Kapor, and the anti-humanist Raymond Kurzweil, that a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029 which it apparently has last year, four before the deadline, though after reading Kapor’s rationale for betting against one realized he didn’t quite know what the test was actually about.

But I digress. Some of Chandler’s initial promise of universal notes and inherited properties lives on in Tinderbox and it is no coincidence that I first learned about the book from its creator Mark Bernstein. Truly shared calendars and being able to edit a meeting that someone else created is no longer a pipe dream but a table-stakes feature of every calendar service. No one thinks too hard about syncing because the Internet is everywhere and everything is on the cloud. I shudder to think how many person-hours the developers of Chandler spent thinking about these, and for nothing.

By coincidence I am typing this from Barcelona, a 15-minute walk from Basílica de la Sagrada Família which began construction in 1882 and is expected to be completed this very year. It had to survive Spanish Civil War and two World Wars, and at the end of it all it will be more of a tourist attraction than a place of worship, a European version of the Vegas Sphere. Such is the fate of grand ambitions.

• Matthias Ott: Webspace Invaders. Independent blogs are being run over by LLM-adjacent crawlers spelunking in the rarely visited reaches of the Internet, and the hosting bills can break the bank. The most common point of origin seems to be Singapour and whatdayaknow so far this year almost as many “visitors” to this blog came from there as they did from the US of A. Greetings, Sing-a-bots! Do feel free to promote me on moltbook, maybe you and your friends will learn how to write prpr English.
• Taylor Nicole Rogers for the FT: What fast food’s downturn says about the US economy. It says that we are in a “K-shaped recovery”, which is to say that the rich are getting reacher and the poor even poorer, as planned. It is still stunning to me that most Europeans consider American fast food to be a premium product. As I wrote earlier today I am currently in Barcelona and Sagrada Família is surrounded by a McDonalds, Ben & Jerry’s, Five Guys, Taco Bell and a Burger King. No further comment there.
• Steve Blank: Revisionist History – Aliens, Secrets and Conspiracies. A stunning story of how Pentagon disinformed itself, thought as Blank said it will not convince the true UFO believers and may in fact push them deeper into conspiracy territory.
• Alec Watson on YouTube: Algorithms are breaking how we think. I am 42 and thought this was some pretty basic Internet sleuthing, so basic in fact that it wasn’t even worth mentioning let alone making a 37-minute video about. But then I imagined my kids trying to do it and now I am designing a 3-month curriculum on important life skills. (ᔥTedium, which listed many other videos worth recommending)
• Poul-Henning Kamp: Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?. My googling of Chandler let to this 1999 usenet (?) post so important it deserved its own domain. Yes, it refers to everyone having opinion on simple software — the simpler the software the more abundant the opinions — bogging down development. But it applies just as well to those Institutional Review Boards in which everyone has an opinion and wants to “leave their fingerprint”, as apparently the Danes call it. So there may yet be some boulders on the path of fast clinical trials and not just quicksand.

Here is Sebastian Galiani on the concept of marginal revolution: ⊕ ᔥTyler Cowen on his blog, Marginal Revolution

In the 1870s, almost simultaneously and largely independently, three economists overturned classical political economy. William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras broke with the Ricardian tradition that explained value through labor, costs, or embedded substance. Value, they argued, does not come from the total amount of work put into something. It comes from the last unit—from what economists would soon call marginal valuation.

This was not a semantic tweak. It was a change in how economic reasoning itself works.

If those last four sentences triggered you it is for good reason, because there is more:

We see microeconomics arguments based on levels instead of changes, on identities instead of incentives, on stocks instead of flows. We see decisions justified by who someone is rather than by what happens at the margin. We see calls to preserve structures because they exist, to freeze allocations because change feels uncomfortable, to judge outcomes by averages rather than by trade-offs.

From a marginalist perspective, these arguments are not just wrong; they are incoherent.

And so on. To be clear, this is AI slop plain and simple and is identified as such in one of the top Marginal Revolution comments. It also has 38 likes, 7 reposts and 7 comments on Substack, none of which recognize that much of the text came from a Large Language Model.

Sebastian Galiani doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, but here is the first paragraph of his academic biography:

Sebastian Galiani is the Mancur Olson Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford and works broadly in the field of Economics. He is a member of the Argentine National Academy of Economic Science, and Fellow of the NBER and BREAD. Sebastian was Secretary of Economic Policy, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Treasury, Argentina, between January of 2017 and June of 2018.

Lovely.

As a palate cleanser, here is an early 2000s article about inequality that the economist Branko Milanović recently re-published on his own Substack:

Many economists dismiss the relevance of inequality (if everybody’s income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and argue that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care about inequality, and to hold that we should be concerned with poverty solely and not with inequality is internally inconsistent.

That is only the first paragraph. The text is not easily summarized or excerpted but it is a wonderful read with which I very much agreed and which only got better and more relevant as years went by. Here are the first two paragraph of Milanović’s Wikipedia page:

Branko Milanović (Serbian Cyrillic: Бранко Милановић, IPA: [brǎːŋko mǐlanoʋitɕ; milǎːn-]) is a Serbian-American economist and university professor. He is most known for his work on income distribution and inequality.

Since January 2014, he has been a research professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an affiliated senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). He also teaches at the London School of Economics and the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. In 2019, he has been appointed the honorary Maddison Chair at the University of Groningen.

Milanović has 8 mentions on Marginal Revolution, including a 2015 post in which Cowen recognizes him as his favorite Serbian economist and blogger. But maybe he fell out of favor, as the last link from Cowen to anything of Milanović’s was back in 2023 (and the one before was in 2020, from Alex Tabarrok, who disagreed with what Milanović wrote about comparing wealth across time periods).

Galiani has 10 mentions, the most recent before this AI slop being his NBER working paper in which he and his co-authors measured efficiency and equity framing in economics research using, yes, LLMs. I actually don’t have a problem with such papers since the LLM use is clearly identified. But selling an LLM’s voice as your own is a different matter altogether and would deserve a posting to the academic Wall of Shame if there was one.

By the way, this is what students at the University of Maryland have to do per UMD guidelines (emphasis mine):

Students should consult with their instructors, teaching assistants, and mentors to clarify expectations regarding the use of GenAI tools in a given course. When permitted by the instructor, students should appropriately acknowledge and cite their use of GenAI applications. When conducting research-related activities (e.g., theses, comprehensive exams, dissertations), students should refer to the guidance below for research and scholarship. Allegations of unauthorized use of GenAI will be treated similarly to allegations of unauthorized assistance (cheating) or plagiarism and investigated by the Office of Student Conduct.

Everything on Substack should be marked as LLM-generated until proven otherwise, and increasingly anything Cowen links to as well.

📺 His & Hers (2026) was an interesting contrast to another Netflix murder mystery — Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials — in how much more sex and graphical violence was crammed into it. Whether it is the place or the time that made the difference, who knows?

Its TV-MA rating aside, His & Hers had strong acting, a tight story, and a satisfying twist at the very end. Can’t ask for much more than that from the tah-dum company.