Spring has so arrived even the metro trains are in bloom.

• Scott Sumner: Too good to be true. Sumner has a PhD in economics and a storied academic career but you don’t need either to confirm his observation that Congress punishes savers and rewards spendthrifts. And in that they are merely following the current animal spirits of the country: behold credit scores plummeting when you pay off your mortgage. Cui bono?
• Joan Westenberg: The “Passive Income” trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs. Certainly not the poor shmucks setting up yet another Amazon enshitiffier dropshipping storefront. As Westenberg points out, far worse than their job of enshittifying my online shopping experience is the opportunity cost: what could have these would-be entrepreneurs done had they not paid $1,000 for a get-rich-quick course? And if you liked that article, do see her [Notes on going solo][2a]. The mind bristles with possible applications for a solo practice.
• Aidan Walker: what would Whitman do?. And what could possibly be more American than a solo practice? After all, it is a country that emphasizes individuality over the communal for better or worse. But of course culture changes all the time and as eternal as this state of affairs seems to have been, Walker reminds us that it is no older than the second half of the 20th century. Before then, and certainly in the time of Lincoln, the themes were:

Nature worship, creative self-assertion, and loving solidarity. This mystic trinity is the foundation of American democracy, which was really founded by Lincoln and not Washington. Liberalism is something they invented in Europe.

• Jorge Arango: Robots in the Garden. But with solidarity dead or dying we have LLMs to turn to. Behold a proposed collective of 9 algorithms to serve as your amanuenses. This may even make me go back to computer note-taking! Arango has a book about that very topic, now on the pile.

Goodbye, Feedly. Now that Inkwell has soft-launched OPML sync ⊕ If you are a Premium user of micro.blog, go to the Account page and click the “OPML Sync…” button in the Feed subscriptions section. It asks for the URL of the OPML file you would like to sync with, though from my experiments “Sync” is a bit of a misnomer as it will only add the RSS feeds it finds there that you don’t yet have on Inkwell but it doesn’t remove the ones that are on Inkwell but not in the syncing OPML. I can go back to FeedLand as my source of RSS feed subscription truth. This also means that my blogroll is due for a makeover. Would it not be much better if I could show the most recent posts for each recommended feed, FeedLand-style?

The second update is to Hugo, micro.blog’s static website generator of choice, which is now version 0.158, from 0.91. Hugo versioning is absolutely idiotic so you can’t tell, but this is a 60-version jump. The tradeoff for the noticeably quicker site generation — from around 2 minutes to <1 minute, important for someone who keeps finding typos in all of their posts — was time spent whack-a-mole-ing errors until I came to just a single WARNING which will hopefully not snowball into anything more serious.

The biggest errors, and the reason why initially the blog wouldn’t render at all, was that a bunch of functions were replaced by different, similarly sounding functions, made for reasons unknown. Petty stuff like .Site.Authors is now .Site.Params.authors, or .Page.Hugo is now hugo.Generator. Things that in the background may have been a life-and-death battle between warring Hugo factions (originalists versus those deathly afraid of technical debt? free spirits versus pedants?) but whose result is mere end-user annoyance. These were a simple Find and Replace away.

Second-order issues came from plugins that have not yet been updated. So in addition to Feedly I have also said my goodbyes to the Stats section of this blog, and to various rarely used functions — how often do people share this stuff on Facebook anyway, and does Facebook still have those web cards for each site?

The last is a warning that the term taxonomyterm has been deprecated and that, per Gemini, I should and I kid you not change taxonomyTerm to taxonomy and the old taxonomy to term. I thought I did this everywhere, but apparently not as I still get that warning each time I post something. But that I can live with.

• Lily Lynch: Birthday Baffler. This is little more than a call-out to her article Yugoslavia Calling, about the world’s first Internet war(s). Well, it’s one more thing: a note that today is Lynch’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Lily!
• Branko Milanović: Yuri Andropov: A man who could have become another Deng Xiaoping…or not. Leave it to Milanović to write an engrossing, educational and highly relevant review of a 40-year-old book. His own Capitalism, Alone from 2019 has also aged quite well.
• Bryan Vartabedian: Three Bottlenecks in Healthcare Delivery. Ah, we have come to the AI section of the link list. This one is about creating abundance in health care and all I could think of while reading the article was the Isaac Asimov quote from 1953: “It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem.”
• Adam Mastroianni: Infinite midwit. The titular midwit is your friendly neighborhood LLM, because Mastroianni shares my observations about the ChatGPT style of writing. As a semi-professional writer, he is more relieved that he won’t be out of work any time soon than frustrated that he keeps encountering dreck. Oh well.
• Ruxandra Teslo: The Bureaucracy Blocking the Chance at a Cure. Teslo asks for more abundance. The Asimov quote a few bullet points up still stands, though it is only a matter of degree that is unknown: we know full well what kind of shenanigans releasing the brakes on early-stage trials would unleash. Again, letting China do it would be a sign of maturity.
• Kyla Scanlon: The Ozempicization of the Economy. I don’t know which part of this hot-take smorgasbord I liked more: Scanlon’s digs at the “prediction” “markets”, her overview of “The Manosphere” (I watched the first 10 minutes of Theroux’s documentary and promptly turned it off as it was little different from watching the actual TikTok videos), or her observations on the most recent war. So, I will only re-quote one MG Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, who per Scanlon tweeted (confusing em-dash spacing included):

We are aware of what is happening in the paper oil market, including the firms hired to influence oil futures. We also see the broader jawboning campaign. But let’s see if they can turn that into “actual fuel” at the pump —or maybe even print gas molecules!

Tee hee.

🍿 The Thin Man (1934) was fun to watch, even with the wooden acting from everyone but the lead characters. Nick and Nora inspired so many other murder mysteries and action comedies that a reboot is only a matter of time, and indeed Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt’s production companies were considering it. I imagine their functional alcoholism will play differently these days.

• Ernie Smith for Tedium: Self-Hosting: Still Worth It?. For some this will be a costly read — and yet still worth it.
• Chris Arnade: Japan: America’s Best Ally? Yelling “Takaichi!” while holding up both thumbs will be my go-to way for getting out of uncomfortable conversations.
• Aishwarya Khanduja and Stuart Buck: The Economy of Knowing: Why Metascience Needs Micro and Macro. At what point does it stop being metascience and becomes applied economics? When you start calling it “macro”, says I.
• Andrew Gelman: Why and how to do Bayes for clinical trials: Our comments on the recent FDA draft guidance, and reactions to two comments by others. People are flabbergasted that the FDA came out with a sensible proposal.
• Anna Moore: Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion. Ben Thompson was the proverbial canary for LLM delusions and Microsoft did him a favor when they nerfed Sydney.
• The Back Focus channel on YouTube: Jim Downey, the Character Actor? | Acting Breakdown. The title is, of course, a play on “Jeff Epstein, the New York financier”, the viewing of which may be the best 2 minutes 16 seconds you will spend today.

🍿 21 Jump Street (2012) was fun, but its main effect was to make me want to rewatch Hot Fuzz.

🍿 The End of the Tour (2015) made David Foster Wallace less handsome — with apologies to Jason Segel — but also less neurotic and more comfortable to watch. For comparison, here is an interview with the real DFW done around the same time the movie portrays, which I dare you to watch without cringing. DFW was an introspection machine, to our benefit and his own detriment, the self-destructed proof that the unexamined life is more viable.