October 2, 2025

Thursday links, statistics and decay

  • Nassim Taleb: The introduction to my paper on data hacking, particularly p-hacking. “The implication is that the conventional p < 0.05 threshold is grossly insufficient; one must demand orders of magnitude stricter cutoffs or radically reframe inference procedures to achieve robustness.” Most of the rest of the pre-print is way over my head, but there are a few highlights for the non-mathematicians.
  • Kagi Blog: Introducing Kagi News. One daily update, well-sourced, beautiful reading experience online and in the app, has an RSS feed. What’s not to love? (ᔥJeremy)
  • Scott Sumner: Subjective time. On the consequences of time passing by more quickly as we age. You may not want to live to one thousand!
  • George Packer: America’s Zombie Democracy. I have enjoyed Packer’s righting ever sine he got Richard Holbrooke’s story exactly right and he doesn’t disappoint here either. There is, of course, a straight line running through the people Packer covered — and was friends with — and the country’s current zombified state. (ᔥTipsy Teetotaler)
  • Aidan Walker: memory is a contest. History both is and isn’t what it used to be, in that the digital age has started a reversion of history to premodern times, relying on a battle of narratives more than the written record. Or has it always been a battle?

October 1, 2025

Starbusters anonymous

Last year, writer Robin Sloan published a brief essay in his newsletter, and one part in particular has stuck with me since:

“You could extinguish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occupied by the task of living.

I was reminded of it talking to a colleague a few days ago who was of a similar (which is to say, middle) age as myself. She noted that we are getting into that not-so-pleasant space in between the hammer of having young children and the anvil of parents who are starting to need some extra care themselves. But of course, I commented, our parents had the same issues and we as children were protected from feeling any effects.

Except now I am having second thoughts, as I do think we have it significantly worse than our parents.

To start with, children require more maintenance than we ever did. Toddler age onward, we act as our progeny’s administrative assistants-slash-social secretaries, scheduling playdates, RSVP’ing to birthday invitations, filling out the afterschool activity calendar. School are no longer send-them-and-forget-them affairs. Parental participation is strongly encouraged and often required. Every day brings a new newsletter from the school district, the school itself, one or more teachers, the PTO, the separately-arranged (and paid for) aftercare, each with a new set of dates to track, tasks to complete, ideas to consider. This is all good! But also exhausting.

Parents live longer, with more chronic conditions and with an ever-growing list of medications. Even those who are healthy have to contend with the modern digital services that have supplanted a 30-minute queuing session at the post office, for which they need technical support. The only apps they can use seemingly without support are those for social media, which they use to spam us with the latest pixelated meme or — if you are not as lucky — AI slop that was reshared in their group.

And then there are our own administrative tasks: separate logins for all utilities, each now requiring 2-factor authentication; mortgage and car payments to keep track of; the ever-growing number of things to repair in the household; all those incantations to chant to get the AV system working (or is that just me?)

So yes, our lives have gotten more complex and if it weren’t for them we’d be busting lots of stars.

September 30, 2025

If you liked Ted Gioia’s reminiscence of David Foster Wallace that I linked to yesterday, you will love Gioia’s follow-up post with recommendations on where to start if you would like to read DFW’s work. To this I would add a plug for The End of the Tour (2015) which is now on my to-watch pile.

Quote of the week, from Adam Mastroianni:

People say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” and they’re right, because you’ll get bored and go home. If you find the job, the cause, and the partner that annoy you in exactly the right way, you’ll never know peace again.

If this weren’t true, few people would choose medicine as a calling.

September 29, 2025

Monday links, old and new

  1. Screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people.
  2. This will lead to widespread depression.
  3. This will also happen at a larger scale. Society will grow more fragmented and disconnected.
  4. Screen technology promises to liberate us, but the reality is that it controls us for the benefit of others.
  5. The people who control the technology work to hide their purposes and goals.
  6. Our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces.
  7. We don’t have many tools, but kindness and compassion will be the starting point.
  8. Art can help us heal.

Indeed.

September 28, 2025

This year’s macOS and iOS updates have been disastrous. My M1 MacBook Air is slowed down to a crawl, with sound completely broken. I need two extra taps to do anything on the phone. And for what? An inconsistent, superfluous anti-user interface effect made for TikTok and Instagram, not humans.

🍿 The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop (2024) was not as focused as I would have liked. It had a dash about board game designers, a splash of podcasters and YouTubers in the space, a good dose of the tabletop world championship, some pieces on players' ever-expanding personal collections, and so on, and so forth. All important, all shot in the modern, pleasing documentary style. Of course, when equal space is given to everything the message can only be “board games good”. Fine, but not exactly masterwork cinema.

🍿 Civil War (2024) was not a story about the United States, current events or politics, but rather about war correspondents and their not-at-all-healthy relationship with work. It could have been set anywhere; for added emotional hit — and to highlight the absolute pointlessness of the job — it takes place in and around the stretch of land from New York City to Washington DC.

Journalism is the focus, but of course the inhumanity of man towards man also shines through. Murders are plentiful and senseless. You are never sure who is on which side in any particular set piece, and if indeed there are any sides. The only thing anyone is sure about is that the dictator is circling the drain and that his fall is a matter of days.

This is where the movie can’t escape its Americanness. Couldn’t the same story have been told about something even more petty? Don’t many real-life war correspondents go through worse ordeals for smaller stories? At the end of the day — and take of this what you will — my war-torn Balkan heart found the movie too optimistic, though it tried to put on a veneer of cynicism. For true bleakness, try Lepa Sela Lepo Gore (1996) (eng. Pretty Village, Pretty Flame), a nihilist masterpiece that an inattentive viewer may confuse for a dark comedy.

Notes on (taking an Uber in) Stresa

Stresa is a tiny town just north of Milan, one of many dotting Lake Maggiore. It was for a 3-day conference with much work to do, but some observations could still be had.

Burn it.

A digital interface displays a lock screen customization view with the options to Cancel or Done. “Done” is barely visible because of low contrast.