Calling it now: “quietly” is Word of the Year 2026.
What AI sired, mindless zeitgeist reverberators now rear.
The human body is not a car. We don’t know how most of it works. There are a handful of labs you should start getting once you hit 40 (or earlier depending on family history), and a few cancer screenings we know work. Anything else is a needless waste of money at best, and a recipe for an iatrogenic disaster if an incidental finding from a whole-body MRI leads to a wild goose chase, biopsies, surgeries, etc. Not to mention the false sense of security these things can give.
My quarterly Now page update is up. Nothing’s new and everything is, depending on your point of view.
Alex Tabarrok writes that it doesn’t matter if the workers’ share of GDP shrinks because of AI. As long as the pie is bigger — and our AI oligarchs say it can be as much as 10% bigger each year! — the average worker will have a bigger share in absolute terms if not in relative.
Hogwash. The one who has the bigger slice has the power to lord over the ones with smaller slices so the relative size does in fact matter. Never mind that our sense of wellbeing is itself ties to how we perceive ourselves in the overall community. What Tabarrok proposes is voluntary serfdom. I think not.
I did it. I used overmorrow in a progress note today.
Doing my part to bring it back.
Haven’t mentioned it in a while, but my move away from Apple continues.
Pixel 10a purchased, GrapheneOS installed.
Alea iacta est.
Calling it now: “quietly” is Word of the Year 2026.
What AI sired, mindless zeitgeist reverberators now rear.
AI has become increasingly important to drug research at big pharmaceutical companies. Eli Lilly, maker of popular weight-loss drugs, has partnered with AI chipmaker Nvidia chips and earlier this year invested in Insilico Medicine, a company focused on AI for drug discovery.
Please. I would wait until any of the money poured into drug discovery AI produces a tangible result before calling it “increasingly important”. Never mind that it’s not the discovery that is the real bottleneck.
The more I think about Dan Wang’s book Breakneck the less I think of it. Wang presents America as a country of lawyers — orderly, slow, nothing gets done — and China as a country of engineers, moving fast and breaking things, some of the breakages being described in detail. If only America was ruled more by engineers, or China had more lawyers involved, and we’d have two great countries instead of two deeply flawed ones.
I would suggest that the true dichotomy Wang described is not one between lawyers and engineers, but one between rule of law and rule by law. If it ever appears that projects are being bogged down in legalese, I would posit that it is not because too many lawyers are involved but rather than an appropriate number of lawyers is trying to, and I am choosing my words carefully here, stop stupid shit being done. They are not always successful but at least they try.
So if it ever appears that infrastructure in America doesn’t get built any more and that nothing ever gets done, it is because the doers of this country have, for the most part, become obsessed with doing stupid shit.
Which is to say, I would be ecstatic if any of my children wanted to pursue a career in law; and I would strongly consider disowning them if they went into finance.
One of many, many details at Meow Wolf Denver. As our teenager — the one pretend-holding this house — noted, it’s like being dropped right into the robot city level of Stray. Parts of it aren’t too far off from Planescape: Torment either. I suspect we’ll keep coming back.
