📚 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.

The streets of Barcelona. They are not usually this littered, or so my friend says, but the wind is exceptionally strong today – strong enough that my flight back home is delayed for severe weather.

• Elmer of Malmesbury (pseud.): My journey to the microwave alternate timeline. What if the microwave oven hadn’t been associated with reheating frozen TV dinners and instead became the go-to appliance for all kinds of cooking?
• Jessica Hullman: Everything I ever needed to know in life I learned from the men in the Epstein files. What if scumbags gave life lessons?
• Bryan Vartabedian: The Fungibility of Doctors. What if American physicians willingly gave away their autonomy and sleepwalked into being cogs in a machine?
• Venkatesh Rao: New Ferality. What if you couldn’t escape the machine even if you tried?
• Delanoe Pirard: Science Judged by Ghosts: 21% of Peer Reviews Are Now AI. What if my prediction starts becoming true?

🍿 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.

23 hours after receiving an email from someone US-based: “Dear Milos, I still haven’t heard back from you so I wanted to bring it back to the top of your inbox…”

3 days after responding to someone from Europe, 7 days after their initial email: “Dear Dr. Miljković, thank you for your quick reply…”

• Matthias Ott: Webspace Invaders. Independent blogs are being run over by LLM-adjacent crawlers spelunking in the rarely visited reaches of the Internet, and the hosting bills can break the bank. The most common point of origin seems to be Singapour and whatdayaknow so far this year almost as many “visitors” to this blog came from there as they did from the US of A. Greetings, Sing-a-bots! Do feel free to promote me on moltbook, maybe you and your friends will learn how to write prpr English.
• Taylor Nicole Rogers for the FT: What fast food’s downturn says about the US economy. It says that we are in a “K-shaped recovery”, which is to say that the rich are getting reacher and the poor even poorer, as planned. It is still stunning to me that most Europeans consider American fast food to be a premium product. As I wrote earlier today I am currently in Barcelona and Sagrada Família is surrounded by a McDonalds, Ben & Jerry’s, Five Guys, Taco Bell and a Burger King. No further comment there.
• Steve Blank: Revisionist History – Aliens, Secrets and Conspiracies. A stunning story of how Pentagon disinformed itself, thought as Blank said it will not convince the true UFO believers and may in fact push them deeper into conspiracy territory.
• Alec Watson on YouTube: Algorithms are breaking how we think. I am 42 and thought this was some pretty basic Internet sleuthing, so basic in fact that it wasn’t even worth mentioning let alone making a 37-minute video about. But then I imagined my kids trying to do it and now I am designing a 3-month curriculum on important life skills. (ᔥTedium, which listed many other videos worth recommending)
• Poul-Henning Kamp: Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?. My googling of Chandler let to this 1999 usenet (?) post so important it deserved its own domain. Yes, it refers to everyone having opinion on simple software — the simpler the software the more abundant the opinions — bogging down development. But it applies just as well to those Institutional Review Boards in which everyone has an opinion and wants to “leave their fingerprint”, as apparently the Danes call it. So there may yet be some boulders on the path of fast clinical trials and not just quicksand.