Antimemetics is a book about anti-memes, but what those are I didn’t quite get because the book itself was written antimemetically.
A part of it may be about inconvenient truths that are important but suppressed: you have to wait for the right time to share them more broadly outside of your group, as “the others” may ignore it or, worse yet, reject it outright. The work of on Curtis Yarvin features here prominently and you know what, maybe his ideas should have been suppressed? Although if I write so I would be a hypocrite, as I have myself recently wrote about the benefits of being more closed which is one of the main antimemes of Yarvin’s that Asparouhova cites.
Or they could be clear truths that are just inconvenient to follow and therefore get ignored, like handwashing. No argument there, although I would take her data point that only around 50% of medical professionals washes their hands at work with a large grain of salt.
And then of course any idea can receive the antimemetic treatment by the way of Straussianism or, what is much more common out there in the wild and is in fact the case with this very blog, by being coated in opaque, obscure and obtuse prose.
Ada Palmer: How is Inventing the Renaissance an SFF-Related Work? This is not the first time I have heard of Ada Palmer’s book about the renaissance. In fact, the book is how I found out about Ada Palmer in the first place. And after this preview it just had to end up on the pile.
Andrew Gelman: OK, I reread that classic paper by Paul Meehl, and . . . An important insight about the difference between how hard and soft sciences use statistics hidden below a bad title with even worse typography. Has Gelman never heard of ellipses?
❄️ Fortunately, our snow shoe quest was successful enough for the kids to be able to spend some time outside every day since Sunday. They even built a snowman with the hard, frozen white mass that passes as snow, so now I have a stalker looking at me through this window. Not at all unnerving!
Book reviews make for great essays, particularly when the reviewer vehemently disagrees with the author’s main premise. The author here is Michael McFaul, a 1990s style liberal democrat who, much like his neoliberal counterparts can’t see that his project failed and therefore cannot even conceive of taking responsibility for that failure. Lynch takes him to task.
Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We’re also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements.
Of course, I would have named it slopocalypse instead of slopacolypse but, you know, potato potatoe.
Both Windows and and MacOS have become sufficiently sloppy that people are looking for an exit. This will be the decade of Linux, and it already started with the Steam Deck about which I haven’t written anything here but have discussed briefly in a podcast (Serbian only).
Scenarios on how physicians may respond to recent developments, with a Focus, Fight, or Build phenotype. At a glance it may look like the Build phenotype may be the “correct” one, but of course Vartabedian correctly points out that these people may soon enough become bullshit artists themselves. These are my words, not his. Dr Vartabedian was much more measured:
The problem I find is that a lot of builders aren’t in the trenches for long. They move into startups or administrative positions. And as they evolve, their view of medicine becomes fixed. And when you’re not struggling with the realities of an inbox, you begin to solve for a world that doesn’t exist.
An LLM-generated music video for millennials
ᔥKevin Kelly which is getting a lot of attention because of course the quick cuts and incoherence of Sora and others are perfect for the medium. This is why people thinking that MTV shut down when it actually didn’t was so salient: its former viewers are being made to think that everyone will soon enough be spinning their own music videos set to their own (kind of) music.
I was down on podcasts at the beginning of the year, but three weeks into the year there were quite a few worth highlighting:
Statecraft: What’s Wrong with NIH Grants. A level-headed view at the Lovecraftian horror that is the federal grants system, from someone who has been in that world for almost two decades. As I noted previously, anyone who wants to reform NIH should first understand it, and the interviewee Scott Kupor seems to know it well.
Stratechery paycast: An Interview with United CEO Scott Kirby About Tech Transformation. United is one of the airlines that started suffering enshittification, but then seems to be turning around largely because of the customer-oriented approach of their CEO who is using their web platform to (shock! horror!) improve the travellers' experience. Of course, everything can be re-enshittified.
Cory Doctorow: The Post-American Internet. Doctorow’s speech on how to make re-enshittification impossible, which has been particularly salient recently. The link is to the transcript. I have no idea how to link to that particular episode of the podcast on its own website — and if it even has one — so here is the link on Overcast.
The Incomparable Mothership: Chekhov’s Chunga Palm. A herd of geeks discusses Pluribus — adorable in the best way possible.
🏀 A rare Wizards home W, against the Portland Trail Blazers. Even a horrible organization can give its fans something to be happy about once every few months.
Sam Rodriques: The Humanity Project. The underlying assumption of this proposal is that the magic of AI will bring about thousands of new molecules and hypotheses on how they work, and that many of them will require testing in humans, and that we therefore better streamline how clinical trials are designed and run by yes, using LLMs. It is the healthcare ouroboros, now loaded with AI!
Nick Schaden: Can the gaming industry adapt to a frozen market?. Gaming being among things suffering death by cloud was not on my radar but of course that it is! Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite are all “games as a service”, i.e. platforms, i.e. stasis generators. Now to find a way to explain to my kids why they are not allowed to spend any more time on Forsaken…
In other news, Tyler Cowen has jumped so high over the shark that he is now levitating somewhere in Earth’s orbit, therefore achieving the correct position for a neutral observer of current events. Even the comments to his post were (somewhat surprisingly, but correctly) unkind.
January 25, 2026
🍿 Tokyo Godfathers (2003) was the perfect Christmas movie that rewards careful viewing, with character design and comedic timing that make all the difference. Unlike other Satoshi Kon fare, it had (mostly) kid-friendly content, no complex cuts, and many laugh-out-loud moments.
