📚 Finished reading: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, a masterpiece that has only become more relevant with time. Not having seen much of the Amazon Prime show I can’t comment on its faithfullness or quality, but I have a hard time imagining it could match the complexity of the original.

• Rebecca Robbins and Gina Kolata for the NYT: Grail’s Cancer Detection Test Fails in Major Study. Some of my earliest tweets — now protected, so apologies for linking if you haven’t already followed me — were about Grail and why their project to screen healthy people for early signs of cancer would likely fail. Nine years and billions of dollars later…
• Peter Bonate: Drugs Explained. A layperson’s primer on drug development from a pharmacologist, available on GitHub.
• Colin Gorrie: How far back in time can you understand English?. One thousand years of the English language in one blog post.
• Joel Hawksley: How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard. It was quite the journey, interrupted by the Boulder County Marshall Fire which burned down more than a thousand buildings in late 2021. “On the night of December 31–January 1, heavy snowfall put an end to the fire.”
• ConchCat: I accidentally ate lunch with a cult. The cult in question is Twelve Tribes, accused of exploiting its followers as free labor, along with assorted abuses of women and children. But the sandwiches were good!

🎙 If you have two hours to spare (a particularly long commute, perhaps?) you could do worse than listen to the most recent episode of the Doomscroll podcast with guest David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Everything. Pairs well with Planet of the Barbarians!

From our visit to the US Capitol: a Corn-inthian column decorating the old entrance.

It took me less that two hours with Google Gemini to create microblog.el, a micro.blog manager for Emacs which can edit old posts, create new ones (even with images), auto-complete tags and perform lightning-fast full text search. What a time to be alive!

• Michael Stott: Will pressure from Trump cause Cuba to finally buckle? We visited Cuba 12 years ago and impressions from that visit now seem terribly quaint. A horrible regime doing horrible things to good people.
• Steven Simon: How ‘homeland’ put America on the path to illiberalism. My favorite T-shirt is almost as old as the Department of Homeland Security — should it not have been the first one to go if one were to cut down on the number of government agencies? As Cory Doctorow recently wrote: “…things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children.”
• Laura Bates: How tech turned against women. Not surprising to anyone who’s spent 5 minutes scrolling through a large enough men-only group chat. Out of 20 men at least two will be pervs — enough to poison the stream through mutual encouragement.
• Janan Ganesh: What social media gave us. An avenue in which to spot the ocasional flash of insight from an unlikely intellectual, mostly. But:

Notice that I have used the past tense about social media in much of this column. To my mind, it is dead, as I quit it long ago. That is a move to be recommended. (Don’t announce that you are leaving, though. Just leave. You are not Adele cancelling that last Vegas residency of hers.)

Indeed.

• Martha Lane Fox: The Price of initiative just collapsed. On the lag between invention and implementation, from printing press to AI.
• Scott Shambaugh: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me. A taste of what’s possible, with follow-up.
• Steve Blank: You Only Think They Work For You. About contracted service providers. The article is about public relations, but applies just as well to contract research organizations (CROs) and these complex dynamics are part of the reason clinical trials are so expensive.
• Andrew Gelman: The 80% power lie. A clear example of why frequentist statistics, so favored by conservative regulators, institutional review boards and scientific review committees, are more often than not based on false assumptions.
• Dr. Drang: Chinese New Year and Ramadan. The pseudonymous doctor often shifts between programming and scripting languages, from R through Python to Mathematica which coincidentally matches my own amateur programmer journey. For this post he used Emacs Lisp and I am very much interested in Emacs and Lisp right now due to recent experimentation with Linux. Saliency FTW.

Part 2 of my Apple decoupling is not ready just yet, but I couldn’t wait to share this preview of my (and Google Gemini’s) micro.blog editing client. I am writing this in the browser as image attachment is not yet fully baked, but it can download and edit existing posts just fine.

Emacs FTW!