🏀 That was… intense. Go, Nuggets! 🛠
Flying for the first time since July, to Chicago.
To vote. In the Serbian parliamentary elections. Lily Lynch has a good writeup of why these are really really really really important.
There are no absentee ballots in Serbia: if you are away from home you either have to haul your behind back, or register to vote abroad. The number of Serbs in Denver being too small to open a polling place there — not that there would be one even if there were more of us, as the soon-to-be former Serbian kakistocracy has been doing its best to suppress the diaspora vote — we did a nick-of-time registration to the one place they had to open up. [Note: But no, it was in fact more complicated than that. We first naively registered to vote in Denver, well ahead of the registration deadline, thinking that the powers that be would, in case there wasn’t a polling place there, re-route us to the closes city automatically like we heard they did in years past. Then we learned that there was no law requiring them to do so. Fearing shenanigans, my wife and I sent a second registration, for Chicago, skipping Denver altogether. And a good thing we did, because my father-in-law, visiting from Serbia, never submitted the re-registration my wife dutifully prepared for him, and learned that his request to vote in Denver was denied, end of story. This all happened a few weeks ago. For those whose jobs, finances and/or child care responsibilities don’t allow for last-minute plane tickets: tough luck. Draw your own conclusions about what the implications are for Serbian democracy. ]
Another cute way to take away people’s right to vote was to have the polling places open at the same time as they are in Serbia. Which is to say, they opened at midnight central, and will close at 1pm. Or maybe 2pm, since today was the end of daylight savings torture in most of the world. I am guessing here, because the official certificate of registration to the Chicago consulate my wife and I received never specified the time. In prior elections, this was 8am to 8pm local time, so those used to voting that way are in for a surprise if they show up in the late afternoon.
Only, this obvious ploy to rig the vote was publicized so heavily that it made people who otherwise may not have voted so pissed off that they registered and started queuing well before midnight. I keep getting videos of long lines in DC, Chicago, etc.
Anyway, it was a 6am flight in — the one I am on now — and a 9pm flight back, with a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago in between. First class for both of us, thanks to the free upgrade from status I earned at my previous job and hope never to have again. The night before, we were privileged to a) witness a Nuggets nail-biter (against the Pelicans, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the season but oh well), and b) participate in the 4th quarter timeout show, wherein the Nuggets mascot Rocky threw a half-court shot behind his back and right into the net, earning us $200 (!?) most of which we will donate. [Note: I would like to think that this was the turning point in the match. The Nuggets were 19 points behind at the start of the quarter. Some of the home crowd was booing. Then Rocky made the shot, the energy changed, and they came back to win in overtime. If you have access to the video via the NBA app you can see for yourself and check if my intuition is correct. ] Which is a long-winded way to say: helluva weekend.
Last night, I booted up a Linux desktop from System76 for the first time. Not one hour after that, I had my very own LLM running on it — Qwen 3, if you are interested in those sorts of things — and through the magic of Tailscale and Open WebUI I can access my own personal chatbot from any of device.
Are the answers I get on the level of Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest? Of course not. But it took merely a glance at some of my previous interactions with the frontier models of two and three years ago to realize that what I have now, running under my desk, plugged into a regular electric outlet, is better, and for many uses significantly better, than what got me singing praises back then.
Take my standard question, on how many total lymphocytes there are in the human body. It is a multi-step calculation that requires good literature search. ChatGPT’s 2023 attempt was decent, but had wonky math, strange formatting and no references. By December 2024, it had significantly improved, but still lacked citations. my home-spun chatbot gave the perfect answer: its own calculations first, then checking the result against the published literature and explaining any discrepancies.
True, it may have had the benefit of an October 2023 review article which answered the question directly. But at least it was able to link to it, and provide a separate explanation for calculating each step.
Then I asked both Claude (Opus 5.5) and my homebot [Note: Yes, that’s what I’m calling them. My own homebot also has a personal name, which I will not share just yet. ] what the best office chair was, regardless of price. Claude spat out what I already knew was common knowledge: Herman Miller Aeron, duh, and here is why. Homebot gave me four options, one of which was the Aeron, one seemed to be quite a bit more affordable but not as high quality, one was a fully motorized “smart” contraption (no thanks) and the fifth was a Steelcase Gesture, which is now on its way to my own home office. [Note: Or rather will be, in 2-3 weeks, because only the uncanny valley equipment that lies between Temu and the likes of Herman Miller and Steelcase can arrive overnight from your local Amazon warehouse. This uncanny valley used to be called premium mediocre, but it’s been almost a decade now that those things have shed any semblance of even mediocre quality while keeping the premium prices. But let’s leave that for another post. ]
Spinning up agents for doing menial tasks is next on the list. More notes to come.
🏀 That was… intense. Go, Nuggets! 🛠
Meaningful innovation in men’s shoes doesn’t come around often, but what Sketchers has done with their hands-free Swift Fit is a miracle — and one you can get for $35 at Costco. Dads everywhere salute you.
📚 Finished reading: The End of Everything: A Novel by M. John Harrison. An anti-narrative which resembles the best parts of Harrison’s short story collection You Should Come With Me Now. Similar themes to Sunken Land…, only more comedic than Lovecraftian. And, to my amazement, on the Booker Prize shortlist for this year. Read it if you can.
Inventing the Renaissance was my “big book” of the year, [Note: Some other Big Books I enjoyed: “The Power Broker” (2015, before I was regularly writing about them), The Three Body Problem series (2017), The Dawn of Everything (2021, closest to “Inventing the Renaissance” in message and style), Goedel, Escher, Bach (2022), and Ada Palmer’s own Terra Ignota series (2024-25). ] and I could not have picked a worse time to start it: changing jobs, moving accross country, an infant at home. It is a testatemnt to how good it was that I finished it. More than that: I am eager to read it again.
Re-reading is necessary to make more sense of the whirlwind of names, dates and events that are just too darn similar, even with Palmer’s attempts to give them cute and memorable nicknames. I know there was a Battle Pope, and a Battle Pope 2, and a very very very (…) bad Pope, but would I be able to tell you their actual names and origin stories?
Fortunately, the thickest, middle part of the book — a bit of a slog, going through biographies of 15 people, some of whom I was already familiar with, most of them new — was there mostly to make the ending more understandable, even if you weren’t on a first-name basis with the protagonists. And the ending is a breezy 200 pages that could have been a book of its own, about virtue, politics, virtue politics, great forces, great people, progress, “progress”, and plagues ancient and modern.
Less fortunately for me, this is the kind of book that makes you want to read many more. The recommended reading list looks absolutely delicious, never mind that I am now watching out for a good translation of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. Ars longa…
A return to form from Vinay Prasad with two short and sweet articles on AI in oncology:
If mathematicians want to complain that computers are replacing them, they should seek the comfort of chess Masters complaining that they have been bested. But they should not look for comfort from doctors. We would do anything to help our patients. We would do anything to extend survival. We already do things on a wish and a prayer and a mechanism of action and a hint of bioplausibility.
True.
As heard at the NIH IRB retreat, which I sadly had to miss:
“For the incredible gift of looking at the most chaotic study designs and effortlessly deciphering their hidden meaning, this goes to Milos Miljkovic!”
Not into sharing accolades here, but I’m super-proud of this one.
🍿 The Running Man (2025) was: