• Lily Lynch for The Ideas Letter: Cold War Fixations.

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.

• Andrej Karpathy on X: A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.

Where the reliably sensible Karpathy provides an update on how he uses LLMs for programming and, well ⊕ ᔥTyler Cowen:

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.

• Bogdan-Mihai Mosteanu: From Microsoft to Microslop to Linux: Why I Made the Switch.

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).

• Bryan Vartabedian: Three Adaptive Stances of Doctors.

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.

This is something I also noticed, many years ago.

• @AutismCapital on X: Severus Snape - ALWAYS (LIVE at Hogwarts) 🔥🔥🔥

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.

But we’re not renewing.

• 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!
• Andrew Losowsky for The Markup: We posted a job. Then came the AI slop, impersonator and recruiter scam. Yet more ways in which LLMs are making hiring challenging, both upstream and downstream of my limited experience with meetings. (ᔥBen Werdmuller)
• 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…
• Richard Griffiths: The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne’s Missing Commonplace Book. I never saw these lists of links as a commonplace book stand-in, but of course they are. Even the find-the-common-theme game was already there (which, duh, it is a common-place book)! I am, of course, closer to the illusion of integrated thought end of the spectrum so thank you for bearing with me, dear reader.

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.

🍿 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.

🍿 Perfect Blue (1997) is a (gory, adult) masterpiece of storytelling and editing which inspired many more works of art. The blurrying of fantasy and reality lands particularly hard in this era of AI slop, and I suspect Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) will have aged even better.

There is a big winter storm threatening most of the continental US, and as any pair of overworked parents with an infant would do, my wife and I waited until a few days before snow piled on DC to get our other kids some new cold-weather boots.

We decided to shop in person rather than on Amazon because: 1) their feet are growing so fast that we have no idea what size boot they would be wearing for a particular model and 2) we had no time to try on a pair and return if the fit was bad, because the snow is coming in, like, less than 24 hours. My wife, having kept some contact with brick-and-mortar stores, suggested we went to the closest large shoes-only stores despite there being a Macy’s, a Nordstrom and a few other general department stores within walking distance from us, because apparently those were’t what they used to be. Okie dokie.

And so we took the green line to DC USA, a “multilevel enclosed urban shopping center anchored by big box stores”, most of which had closed since the mall’s heyday but we both remembered there being a DSW just around the corner and how could it have possibly gone out of business when its nearby competitor went bust shortly after we moved to DC? I think you can see where this is going: DSW too closed its DC locations for good early last year so we “kissed the door” as they say.

But there was a Target in the same building, and a Marshalls, and even something that used to be called “Burlington Coat Factory”. Surely between the three we would find a decent selection of children’s winter boots in the middle of January. Not a chance, said my wife who is wise and knowledgable in the ways of shopping, I write this without wanting to promote any stereotypes because we both in fact hate shopping, but it is all a matter of degrees and she hates it slightly less than I do. and I didn’t trust her but I should have because I did go into the Target remembering it as the Target of my youth — well, late 20s — when I had just come to America and its shelves along with those of Wallmart seemed to stretch into infinity.

My friends, the kids shoe shelf of this particular Target did not stretch into infinity. It barely stretched six feet. It had no more than three sizes of each model and no more than two models of each shoe type. Marshalls was even worse. Under the wise direction of our master shopper we didn’t even walk into the Burlington.

Which is to say, before online services began enshittifying, they had already spurred self-enshittification of the offline world. ⊕ Cory Doctorow may have intended enshittification to signify the four-stage worsening of online services under the squeeze of financialization, but Doctorow himself in the book and elsewhere welcomed the broader use of the term which is what I’m doing here and if you want to be pedantic call if “self-shittification” instead. There is an economy/sociology/other “soft” science paper there somewhere in describing the stages of offline enshittification. Put it together with online and you get a PhD in enshittology. Big department stores have been hollowed out, along with big book stores, big electronics, big toys, big airlines, and anything else big that depended on volume and not personal relationships and brands. Like all bad things, this happened slowly then suddenly: trying to outcompete the cloud businesses, they themselves raised a toe up to the cloud. ⊕ Note how the de-enshittifcation of big box stores involves a more personal approach. Those who can pivot to it will survive. But being a cloud platform is like pregnancy — you either are or are not — and they were clearly not.

Effects of the cloud on everyday life are particularly salient now that I’ve read Technofeudalism Though I maintain that “cloudism” is the better term and will use it instead. so this may be overstating the matter, but the broadest correct use of “enshittification” could be to describe the negative effects of cloud platforms becoming the dominant form of ownership, the thing that people need to have in order to become the movers and shakers of other people’s lives. For most of human history “the thing” was land. For the last few hundred years it was manufacturing capital. And now it’s this.

Each time, it made sense to sacrifice some of the base layer to build up and up. Yes, food was still important but even more important was the capital, so raze those fields of wheat and corn to erect factories. The famine will be worth it in the long run, for the survivors.

This is one big way in which cloud platforms have ruined meatspace. ⊕ Digishittification!Another one is the digitization of what should be simple tasks: from AV equipment at a university to digital homes. This is different from what happened to big box stores as it is not a self-inflicted response to cloudism but rather the effect of cloudists trying to impose themselves further onto meatspace and expand their domain to an ever-increasing number of objects and interactions. Heated seats as the horse armour of our new age, though even Bethesda didn’t have the gall to ask for recurring payments.

The third and personally most irksome form is the enshittification of our inner lives. ⊕ Lifeshittification! I have spent the last hour recounting our family’s voes of shoe shopping instead of cooking brisket. My conversations increasingly revolve about bad things that are happening, the reasons why they are happening, and the ways to prevent them from happening. More often than note this means: Teams is junk; Microsoft is a junk company; try to get Microsoft out of your life even if it means changing your kids' schools. Attention is now the commodity that land and capital used to be, and the cloud platforms have most of my attention. So is there even a way to win this fight?