JTR gave me a kick in the rear I needed to update my Blogroll page. There has been way too much cruft accumulated, with some recommendations not having posted in years. It is still a work in progress — only the first two lists are done — but better than nothing! For a (nearly) up-to-date list of every feed I follow, check out Feedland.

• Ed Zitron: Am I Meant To Be Impressed?. A detailed account of why you cannot trust anything tech companies say about the business side of AI, even in official SEC-sanctioned documents (because, of course you can’t). Note in particular how the unsuspecting public buys their narrative about big AI spending leading to increased profits hook, line, and sinker (the “profits” coming from bloated valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic). I am no fan of Apple, but it appears that they have made the right choice by staying out.
• Richard Dawkins: Is AI the next phase of evolution? ⊕ [Note: ᔥJason Kottke ] A eulogy to New Atheism.
• Lada Nuzhna: What the hell is happening in China? This is with regards to their push in biotech. All good things, I’d say.
• Isaac Greene: The Gift of Music. A delightful reframing of gift-giving.
• Derek Sivers: Geography is four-dimensional. About knowing places only at a certain time. The short essay matches my own experience of being asked what Serbia is like now. Having last truly lived there more than 15 years ago, the only correct answer is that I haven’t a clue.
• Charlie Chaplin: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator, with transcript. It gave me chills.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

Amen.

What possessed me to type x.com into the address bar I can tell you not, but there I was, staring for the first time in weeks at the “For you” tab. And there it was, in all capital letters: “THIS IS HOW WE CURE PANCREATIC CANCER”, staring back.

That was the X-crement of one Derek Thompson, writer for The Atlantic, podcaster, abundance enthusiast. It was promoting his most recent blog post which, being on Substack rather than X, had a more subdued name: “How AI Could Help Cure Pancreatic Cancer”. It is, supposedly, an interview with a co-author of a paper with an ever-less-so boastful name: “Next-generation AI for visually occult pancreatic cancer detection in a low-prevalence setting with longitudinal stability and multi-institutional generalisability”. Most of the interview, however, is behind a paywall which I shall not climb.

Above the fold is Thompson’s exuberant, hyperoptimistic speculation. He approaches the problem from the perspective of the three recent developments — one from above, the other two previously discussed — but presents the areas which they are “solving”, targeting KRAS mutations, pancreatic cancer’s immune evasiveness, difficulties with early detection, as the sole reasons why the disease is so difficult to treat.

But that is disingenuous. There are so many more reasons why it is hard: the uniquely hostile, acidic, high-pressure environment of the tumor that makes drug delivery to it nigh-impossible. It’s propensity to metastasize — spread to distant organs — no matter what size the original tumor is. A biochemical storm it stirs up in the body leading to rapid weight loss, blood clots and horrendous pain which are distinct even among other cancers. Why not highlight those three as the “3 broad reasons why pancreatic cancer is so hard to treat”, to use Thompson’s terminology? Well, no recent high-profile studies for those, are there?

I understand that he has some personal reasons to be interested in pancreatic cancer, and I am sure it is coming from the best of intentions, but please.

• Bob Grant: The Mysterious Hantavirus Outbreak That Put the Virus on the Western Map. European hantavirus is what you get when mice pee all over your idyllic mountain cottage. It causes your kidneys to fail and you may need dialysis until they heal, but unless you had bad kidneys to begin with there should be no permanent damage. The (wild) west hantavirus you can get from mice and humans alike, goes for your lungs instead of the kidneys, and kills 4 out of 10 humans who get it. And now there is a cruise ship full of people who were exposed. As if I needed another reason to avoid cruises like the plague.
• Kristen French: What Your Dream Life Says About You. It tells me I wake up too early because I only remember them once every few weeks!
• Kristen French interviews Lisa Feldman Barrett: How Does Your Brain Know a Cat Is a Cat? It is about Barrett’s Nature review which is behind the paywall but at least gives out the punchline in the title: “Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain.” Barrett’s own article in Nautilus, about emotional intelligence, is also worth a read.
• Jake Currie: The Best of NASA’s Newly Released Photos From the Artemis II Mission. An excellent source of desktop and smartphone backgrounds.
• Bob Grant, again: AI Music vs. My Parents. A sad state of affairs. Thankfully, personal experience tells me the younger generations are better at identifying saccharine “content” as slop and filtering it out.

I see these “Sysco” trucks all around DC, blocking driveways, hanging out in the middle lanes, making commutes and school dropoffs misreable. Lo and behold, their driving style matches their corporate mission. As if I needed another reason not to eat out.

This letter to Ted Turner from his dad on the choice of college major could be the best thing you will read today. Horribly misguided and against everything I stand for, but oh how much fun. This is how it starts:

My dear son,

I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a Major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today.

And it gets better! (ᔥNY Times Pitchbot on Bluesky)

• Brian VanHooker for Polygon: An oral history of The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Netflix’s quirky sci-fi masterpiece. I don’t know how long an article needs to be or how many people need to be involved for it to qualify as an oral history, but this ain’t it. Still, it is about one of our family’s favorite movies so I felt obligated to link. For sampling of a true “oral history”, check out The Ringer.
• Nick Schaden: Discs versus digital: A buyer’s guide. Discs, of course, which are no less digital than streaming and are impervious to flaky internet connections.
• Gabby at woolgathering: one ticket for two movies, please!. Some interesting movie pairings, with the very first one proposed spanning the longest time period: Bringing Up Baby from (1938) + What’s Up, Doc? (1972).
• Scott Sumner: Films of 2026: Q1. Many of them are behind the Substack paywall (why, Scott, why?) but the reviews of new-ish movies I never would have heard of otherwise is above the fold. His brief re-re-review of Mulholland Drive is spot on.

In the most recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber and MG Siegler agreed that the smartphone will be difficult to overthrow as the dominant method of computing. Something unthinkable would need to happen for us to leave the phones at home in favor of watches, earbuds or pendants, Her-style. So, even if SoC and batteries improve to such extent that we could fit the 2040s equivalent of an M5 chip into a MacBook, iPhone and AirPods equally, and all with great battery life, people would still reach out for their phones first.

This wasn’t the first time I heard the thesis, and it always sounded about right. I don’t know about everyone else, but I tend to be impatient when chatting with Siri. This isn’t about its “lack of” intelligence: although I had only used ChatGPT’s voice chats as a novelty when demoing it to elderly family members, even they needed a few more seconds to answer specific questions than my patience would allow. So why is that?

Well, my impatience would suggest that bandwidth is key, more specifically our own bandwidth to process information. Humans are visual creatures: much of our own brain’s neural pathways are tied up in receiving and processing information from the 6 million cones and 120 million rods contained in the approximately 2,200 square millimeters of our retinas. The next sense down in the number of receptors is not even close: touch, with about 4 million somatosensory receptors packed in the average 1.79 square meters — or 1.79 million square millimeters — of body surface area. That is two orders of magnitude more sensors packed into three orders of magnitude less space in retina (sight) versus skin (touch). What about sound, which is competing with sight as the interface of record? There are around 15,500 hair cells in each cochlea for 31,000 total — not even close. ⊕ [Note: This is why writing has been the defining achievement of our species, condensing the ineffable into something we can quickly process, and why I will never get tired of reading histories of notebooks and paper. ] But you don’t need to know any of this to have experienced dreams. When was the last time you remembered a particularly nightmarish smell or sound when you were asleep?

So if the optimal way for computers to communicate with us is via retinal inputs, does it not make the most sense to attach most of the local computing machinery onto the interface?

But what about our outputs? Unless you were born on Krypton one wouldn’t expect anything shooting out of your retinas to interact with the environment. Well, here is my main uncertainty in the smartphone-as-the-ultimate-device hypothesis: could you not, on an infinite timescale, wear contact lenses that could beam in information to you as efficiently as possible? Are the Apple Vision Pro and whatever creepiness Meta is out with now not steps towards our corneal computing future? Perhaps, but perhaps not, and the interaction with whatever is beamed into our eyes will be the next limiting factor.

All our movements are planned in the prefrontal cortex and executed in the precentral gyrus of the frontal cortex. A lot of that surface area is dedicated to our hands, as the creepy but to the best of our knowledge accurate cortical motor homunculus shows. ⊕ [Note: Fun fact about the brain: it’s plastic. In that, it can and does get rearranged as circumstances warrant, and the extent of the rearrangement can be drastic. But receptor numbers are what they are, so any broad changes to the general population would have to take… millennia? Dozens of millennia? Certainly longer than the life span — not to mention attention span — of the average S&P 500 company. ] The side by side representations of the sensory and motor homunculi twins is particularly striking in showing how important our hands are to our sense of self. Now, another prominent feature they have are large tongues and lips, much of it in the service of producing sound, so it is not a surprise that voice controls exist, and not just for the times when our hands are otherwise occupied. Yet what the homunculi show and what any cat parent will attest is that humans are, to the outside world, mostly a pair of hands attached to some rather bizarre squishy elements. Hey, we may as well own it!

The most serious consequence of this state of affairs, much to my disappointment, is that smartphones as we know them are here to stay so there isn’t much point in hobbling my own computing experience with black and white displays, “feature” phones and the like. While I would have loved, in my project to ditch Apple, not to replace my iPhone with anything else “smart”, reason says to try and find a true alternative. GrapheneOS looks promising, and by the time my current phone kicks the can or passes on something else may come along. Here’s hoping.