With today’s Alphaville, I have never been more proud of paying for a (not cheap!) subscription. (ᔥJohn Gruber, who also provided some non-gift-link-requiring context)

• Jason Kelly on X: The crisis in biotech startups is not just “biotech being cyclical” - you can see clearly that the rise in Chinese startups is not cyclical over the last 25 years - it’s spiking up in the last 10 years (see chart below from @AsimovPress). This is in response to a post from Bruce Booth arguing that the rise in Chinese biotech is not just a threat for the US but also an opportunity, and one that should be a cause for optimism. Booth responded in turn. I am close to finishing Apple in China and based on that alone I tend to side with Kelly. Riding dragons is a dangerous business, as both Apple and Tesla have found out in their respective industries. There are, of course, a few ways in which biotech is significantly different from cars and phones that requires some more thinking, but that is for a different post.
• Cory Doctorow on Mastodon: On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled “A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet” for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech. Not just post-American but post-Chinese Internet as well, so this is a talk about robustness and dare I say antifragility through decentralization, not anti-imperialist rambling (although this being Doctorow there is some of that sprinkled in too). A video version is also available.
• Matthew Dowd on X: Pickle Expose: Sliced and Diced. Engrossing article in the form of a full-blown X post, with links, in-line images and half-decent typography. (ᔥJohn Gruber))
• Katyayani Shukla on X: Warren Buffett literally gave a free 1-hour masterclass on business. I saw the video and thought that Mr. Buffet was looking unusually spry for a 95-year-old! Well, the speech is from July 18, 2001 and is available in both YouTube video and transcript form, so there was no need for contextless X posts with worse quality video and audio. This particular one got 7.5 thousand likes and 2 thousand reposts in less than two days. I guess not everyone appreciates context and citation as much as I do. (ᔥJohn Mandrola, also on X)

Note: Despite three of the four links being from X, I have to admit that I am finding Mastodon more and more enjoyable and the superior of the four post-Twitter offerings, at least for me and my tastes. I am still vacillating on whether I should just use my micro.blog account to follow all non-X users, but then Ivory is too good of an app not to use. Advice appreciated.

• John Plender: How the bubble bursts, with some informative graphs. Remember Melania coin?
• Melissa Heikkilä: Computer scientist Yann LeCun: ‘Intelligence really is about learning’. LeCunn is leaving Facebook/Meta soon to chair a more Euro-centric startup. From how he describes the workings of Meta in this Lunch with FT, it seems to be a wise move.
• Jo Ellison: Please don’t talk about my generation, which in her case is Generation X. Our children apparently include generations Z, alpha and beta which is all you need to know about the usefulness of the model.
• Sam Anderson: Inside the Choreographed Chaos of ‘The Pitt’. We are in the middle of Season 1 and I can see the appeal, including the wonderful performance of Katherine LaNasa as the charge nurse. Glad to learn she received an Emmy for it!

Unlike the last time, I do plan intend to read all of them!

1. You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts by M. John Harrison, who is among my favorite writers. I will also most likely re-read Viriconium, which is among the best short story collections out there, just make sure to get the edition with the “correct” story order. He also has a blog through which I learned about at least two good books.
2. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, while re-reading Ubik, The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which are part of the same collection.
3. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which got on my radar after seeing One Battle After Another and learning it was based on several of Pynchon’s stories. So, I picked up an easy one to get acquainted with his work.
4. Letters from an Imaginary Country by Theodora Gross, as recommended by Cory Doctorow whose Enshittification I very much enjoyed.
5. Apple in China by Patrick McGee, which I am reading now and is making me realize what a horrible corporate citizen Apple was and most likely is, though all of those issues are probably more salient so soon after reading Enshittification. Still, you don’t get to a $1T valuation by being a minnow!
6. Breakneck by Dan Wang. At this point I have read so many podcasts and essays by, with and about Wang that I wonder what would be the point of reading the book itself, but I am a completionist.
7. Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, which was itself recommended in Thinking With Tinderbox, from a journalist embedded in a software development team for a new type of a PIM app (remember those?) called Chandler. Just seeing a few screenshots of the never-quite-released app will help you realize why I have the book.
8. Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne. This book is six years old which from its mini-review in the FT seems to be a good case for regulating big tech written by someone from big tech (the author was Microsoft’s general counsel for 17 years).
9. Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark. I don’t remember who recommended this but I love reading about style guides and writing tips, if not necessarily implementing them.
10. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Book 1 by John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro. A very good friend has been hounding me for years to watch Vervaeke’s 50-part lecture series of the same name, but who has the time? Let me know when he has a book out, I told my friend, and so here we are.
11. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurus by Steve Brusatte, as recommended by Matt Wedel of the SV-POW blog. Just keeping up with my kids' interests!
12. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow, which I picked up at random at last year’s National Book Festival after seeing it has at least a few pages on Twain’s friendship with Nikola Tesla.
13. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, just so I could learn what on Earth happened with his cancer (non)treatment.
14. Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparaouhova and The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet by various authors, both released by Metalabel. Dark forests, of course, being very much top of mind for me lately.

🍿 The Family Plan 2 (2025) was, much like its predecessor, a tame mid-budget family action comedy of the kind they don’t show in theaters any more (and for good reason): perfect for post-prandial viewing in this holiday week.

• Ruxandra Tesslo and Asimov Press: Clinic-in-the-Loop

The case for faster bench-to-bedside-and-back type of research, with which I agree. It is remarkable, however, how each generation interested in biomedical research reinvents the wheel without checking prior art. I would also argue strongly that the (correct) thesis of the essay is not a refutation of the biotech-as-casino hypothesis but rather its confirmation, unless you enlarge “biotech” to include academia and government research but then what are we even doing. Investors have no patience for nuance and view clinical trials as dichotomous regardless of how companies try to present them, and interpreting translational research results requires even more patience and tolerance of ambiguity.

• Elizabeth Ginexi: The Quiet Power of Program Officers

Ginexi has been a program at the NIH for more than two decades, so caveat lector, but many POs are indeed mini-Moseses in their scientific domains. On one hand they perform important and valuable work, on the other the importance of a single human being to the careers of investigators young and old tend to favor those with soft skills of communication more than those of scientific and intellectual rigor. No judgements on my end because I genuinely can’t tell if the alternative would be any better.

• James L. Olds: A Grant Reviewer’s New Year Advice to Proposers: What I’d Tell My Younger Self

Some genuinely good advice on how to write grants in a way to increase the odds of them being funded, with emphasis on accepting the reviewers' comments and suggestions and approaching the grant resubmission as one would an offer to revise and resubmit a scientific manuscript, with much thanking and back-bending. Do keep that in mind when you read the next item.

• Laurel Raffington: Academia is just a job

This is true for most, as there are far too many academic right now for all of them to have soul in the game. However, academia continues to ask for more than it gives back out of too many people, while at the same time putting a negative selection pressure against people who are stubborn, single-minded and thus predisposed to a soul-in-the-game phenotype (see above). The only reason why the system survives at all is that the churn has been too low to fully reveal the tension, but it continues to creep towards the breaking point providing yet another case study of things that happen gradually and then suddenly.

• Trowaway_whistleblow on r/confession: I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The ‘Priority Fee’ and ‘Driver Benefit Fee’ go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. Big if true, and of course it’s true. Our family has stopped using DoorDash last year and we have never used Uber Eats so I will allow myself a moral victory lap, but the reasons for not using them were more prosaic (too slow and too many missed orders).
• Dan Wang: 2025. Wang’s yearly letter starts off with thoughts on Silicon Valley and its similarities to China. It is hard to square his generally positive disposition and stories about charming San Francisco billionaires who don’t have time to set up a bed for their mattress in a nearly-empty flat with the above product of Silicon Valley culture. In this I will agree with Wang: SV bros and the Chinese Communist Party are equally abhorrent, and for similar reasons.
• Doug Belshaw: What promised to liberate us instead helps to control us. A fairly short blog post that added many new-to-me rabbit holes to a well-trodden topic that has seen many other metaphors. The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Hun will likely join the pile though as a slight 72-page essay I hope it won’t stay there for too long.
• Henry Desroches: A website to destroy all websites. Another familiar topic with some clear call-to-action advice, including “Don’t worry about design (unless you want to)”, while of course being beautifully typeset and designed. So, let me get on my soapbox and state the obvious:

Key assumptions that underly this and many similar essays is that people involved have (at least) a laptop computer, know how to use it beyond Zoom and the Office suite, and want to spend time on it over and above what they need to spend on their day job. There will never be a flourishing bazaar of personal websites made by people who are not at the very list interested in web design and/or programming, if not card-carrying members of various IT professions.

I consider myself a dabbler and you are reading this via a product of said dabbling, but if the likes of Nassim Taleb or Frank Harrel or Vincent Rajkumar or whatever other luminary of your field of interest decides it’s too complicated or time-consuming to have personal websites that interact through a muddle of comments, web mentions and whatever other new standard some whiz kid comes up with. So they just keep using X or Bluesky or Mastodon, because that is also where their readers and followers and friends and family members are, so I will also have those accounts despite my best efforts, and so the wheel will keep turning and churning and spitting in and out anyone who is not IT-adjacent and many of those who are, which is to say most of the world.

This is why I am excited about what Dave Winer et al. are doing with 2-way RSS. Winer’s one-man projects have ben technically terrific but ultimately too challenging to use, so here is hoping that broader involvement will add some spit-and-polish. With social media more splintered than at any time since the late 2000s the time to strike is now.

📺 I will have more to write about each season of Stranger Things after the holidays. But how refreshing was it for a show to clearly distinguish between good and evil, for that evil to be cosmic not personal, and for the ending to be unambiguously happy and satisfying? Bravo, brothers Duffer.