🍿 Your Name (2016) was unexpectedly good for a movie we chose at random after kids wanted to see “an anime” and we had already seen everything from Miyazaki more than once. But then I am a sucker for — spoiler alert — time travel plots.
Why no scientist should hang their hat on a single pet theory, with real-world examples. The same problem haunts the world of biotech even as its denizens claim their superiority at drug development.
About a recent Nature Medicine article which found that LLMs were no better than Google at helping patients diagnose and manage their self-reported maladies. The reasons are those that I suggested two and a half years ago — ChatGPT can give you the correct answer from a properly structured clinical vignette, but the art and science of medicine are transferring the reality in front of you — the patient’s haphazard story, their hodge poge of medical records, the subtle physical exam findings — into something salient. Not saying AI won’t get there at some point, but it clearly still needs work.
Rao has collected 101 (!?) of his best Twitter threads and a few hundred single tweets into a book. A note on the title page says:
This book is LLM-friendly. Point your LLM to venkateshrao.com/twitter-book if you want it to explore it. A full interactive archive, explorable via an AI oracle, is under development.
Living up to his call to be (slightly) monstrous.
Yes, it is a person I hate making a good point, which is that the brutalist architecture of L’Enfant Plaza is out of place so close to the National Mall and should be kept where it belongs. I even prefer the proposed neoclassicist style to what Trump’s ego would want, which I imagine to be a Dubai And even Dubai would be better than what’s in the President’s id. on the Potomac.
Cabel Sasser: Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural. Sasser expands on his wonderful 2024 XOXO talk about a 10-year quest, which you should of course watch before reading.
Luke Bouma for Cord Cutters: Babylon 5 Is Now Free to Watch On YouTube. Could it be true? Would the badly run and technologically incompetent Warner Brod Discovery really commit this act of unprovoked altruism on the official Babylon 5 Youtube channel? Of course not — as of today the uploaded pilot is set as private.
🍿 Sinners (2025) was as good as it gets, particularly if you are into horror-lite, From Dusk Till Dawn-type action movies that carry an added poignant message or three. What was it about 2025 that the movies I liked the most were all about monsters?
🍿 The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) was a waste of good actors, fantastic (hah!) set design and Michael Giacchino’s era-appropriate score. There are concepts that work in comic books which are just too big for movies, and Galactus is one of them.
If nothing else, Writing Tools — or rather its chapter on the ladder of abstractions — reminded me why I abhorred corporate speak. But that is just one of the 55 nuggets of wisdom, most of which I haven’t seen written down in quite that way before. Let’s see how much of it sticks.
A quick trip to the Library of Congress. I could spend all day just staring at this ceiling.
📚 Finished reading: You Should Come With Me Now Stories of Ghosts by M. John Harrison. Stories and tweet-length fragments of middle age unease which, looking back, were Harrison clearing his throat before The Sunken Land…
🎙 A plug for the most recent ATP podcast special, After Apple. Yes, my frustration with the company has grown since reading about their dubious business practices and I typing this from Asahi Fedora to which my M1 Air can now dual-boot. But mostly I am just fascinated by the speed with which the ATP trio took up my suggestion.
I did not and do not expect any of them to quit Apple any time soon, and for reasons they stated, but it sure made for a fun discussion. If I had one nit to pick it was that they did not identify the company’s exposure to and reliance on China as a risk. The whole fragile supply chain that Tim Cook created under the mantra that inventory was evil could be gone in a gunboat flash.
🍿 Any Given Sunday (1999) is a pro sports movie that doesn’t mention the Internet and barely recognizes gambling. What a difference 27 years make.
🍿 Urchin (2025) was a decent anti-drug movie, but why the overblown praise for Harris Dickinson as a first-time director? Kudos for steadying the camera and not going too close into people’s faces, I guess.