This is a sculpture of a single translucent disk and some cleverly positioned spotlights. Made in 1969 by Robert Irwin and now at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC, it reminded me, of all things, of a Reddit thread.
Alex McCann: The Case for Active Optimism. Speaking of! Yes, let’s extrapolate the transitions from agranian to industrial to information societies into this new transition to the society of slop (SoS). I still worry that those required levels of civic vigilance that we are not currently able to muster (and arguable failed at even as moved from industry to information, hence our current predicament).
In addition to the categories listed on the blogroll my RSS reader has one labeled “New” which acts as a saucer for my feed subscriptions. I end up deleting quite a few of these — the post that got me interested may not be representative of the whole thing
Which brings up an interesting question of whether or not blogs are ergodic. Let that be an excercise for the reader. — but some do move on. Below are a few of those.
Tonsky.me by Nikita Prokopov, “Software Engineer with a vast open-source portfolio and strong UI/UX background.”
nickschaden by Nick Schaden, “an engineering manager and creative technologist”.
journal.stuffwithstuff.com by Bob Nystrom, a “programming language developer at Google working on Dart, ex-game developer at EA, UI nerd, author of ‘Game Programming Patterns’ and ‘Crafting Interpreters’”.
An honorable mention goes to the Bear Blog Discovery feed which will forever remain in the “New” category as new blogs keep bubbling up. That feed is also the reason “Hardware & Software” blogs overrepresented in the above list. My preferred platform, micro.blog, also has a Discovery feed, but since it tends to promote micro posts (duh) it is there more to find new people to follow on micro.blog itself rather than the feed reader.
So, any pointers to non-technical blog chains and other discovery mechanisms would be much appreciated!
Aaron Cheng: On the emotional weight of a life in medicine. Thoughts of a newly-mintend hematologist which act as a good counterbalance to the popular fictional accounts. Feel free to peruse the few pre-2017 posts from the Infinite Regress archive for my own thoughts from that period.
Joseph Howlett for Quanta Magazine: The Man Who Stole Infinity. On Georg Cantor, plagiarist. It does cause one to become more cynical, as we keep discovering that high-profile scientists built their reputiations on the backs of people with more scrupules and less need for attention. Taleb’s minority rule applied to sociopaths.
We went to the Hirshhorn Museum to see their Basquiat X Banksy exhibit, stayed for this magnificently decorated room by Laurie Anderson. She spent more than two weeks working 10-hour days to paint it in 2021, when she was 74 years old, and you can see the experience seep through the walls.
March 1, 2026
🍿 Oppenheimer (2023) was even worse on rewatch than I first remembered: disjointed, nonsensical, wooden characters, opaque motivations, telling-not-showing. There is a capital-m Movie to be made about the making of the atomic bomb but whatever Nolan did was not it.
Drugs which look great in those cellular machinery flow charts with boxes and arrows pointing every which way, and which may even cure a few genetically monstrous and wholly artificial lab mice, tend to flop where it matters. Lowe links to 11 such examples and writes in more detail about the twelfth.
An overly long article
ᔥNintil with which I don’t completely agree
For example, Kroetsch describes the role of a site investigator as resembling “that of a glorified data entry clerk - the investigator’s primary responsibility is gathering the data that the drug company needs and sending it to them”. This is incorrect: site investigators usually have clinical research coordinators and data managers to do it for them. But this deserves a post of its own. but which nevertheless provides a good overview of the many things wrong with how clinical trials are being conducted in the US, the biggest one being that they are reinventing the wheel each and every time they are done. The “lean trial” proposal at the end matches my own thinking.
Teslo picks up on the tech bro magical thinking streak in which things you don’t sufficiently understand seem eminantly solveable using the most recent technological developments. Five years ago it was electronic medical records and blockchain, now it’s clinical trials and AI. The article gives the many reasons why things are not that simple. Now, if we all agreed on the set of LLM prompts that would provide an unbiased protocol and informed consent form review thus eliminating as many people from the loop as possible, well, then we may be on to something.
If someone qualifies for euthanasia, should they also not be eligible for every expanded acces, compassionate use, right-to-try scheme imaginable? Obviously: yes. Maybe not so obviously: there is a branch of my subspecialty aptly named desperation oncology which in the vast majority of cases leads to false hope, financial ruin and, worst of all, time misspent in doctors' offices and infusion clinics instead with your loved ones. As a doctor and a human being I am partial to life, so I see state-assisted dying programs like Canada’s MAID as monstrous, but “you’d rather be dead so here, take this drug” is only a half-step above that qualifier and leads to the bad reputation of experimental therapies.
iCloud on the web is surprisingly good. The only thing missing is iMessage, which should have been there instead of the never-used Invites app. It feels like it was created just to fill up that spot in the 4x3 rectangle.
AI is currently entering our civilization as a synthetic, dazzling image of a fire projected on a wall, and the tech people are saying “look, it’ll cook everything and keep you warm” as you stand wearing mittens holding a raw steak. Meanwhile, you watch those same people drown the embers of the ancestral hearth fire, around which you once gathered with your family while the chowder-pot simmered, with gallons of freezing water.
There also needs to be accountability: Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg should go to prison. I’m not even sure for what, but these men are clearly the kind of person the world’s folkloric traditions warn us about, demonic and hollow, a threat to the social order. We need deterrence, because right now people look up to these guys and aspire to be like them.
AI serves as a source of cheap and “good enough” intellectual and emotional labor. Since we increasingly don’t provide that stuff to each other through systems because they have been plundered by rich people, AI plays an important social role. It is to thinking and feeling what McDonald’s is to eating.
If we’re living in a crisis of loneliness, bad mental health, and plummeting media literacy, then the arts are the number-one thing that can help solve those issues.
