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…”

Last month I linked to two things that are now worth following up on:

• John Nerst’s book “Competitive Sensemaking” is out. The only non-Amazon option is an ebook, so I will leave this one for the Daylight tablet.
• Steven Johnson’s NotebookLM project “Planet Of The Barbarians” is also live, accompanying the newsletter series of the same name. Even more interesting to me are [the notebook][3b] and [newsletter post][3c] titled “The Architecture of Ideas”, referencing Johnson’s work on tools and workflows for writing. Warning: both are full of rabbit holes.

And on the abandoning Apple front:

• Matt Gemmell has concerns about Apple much better baked than my own. He also has thoughts on detaching but seems less willing to give up on the ecosystem than I am. (ᔥJohn Brady)
• My own toe in the Apple-less pool is giving up on the essential Mac-only apps. OmniFocus was the first on the chopping block, replaced by Emacs org-mode, though instead of going through now pretty dated tutorials behind that link I just asked Google Gemini how best to convert Kurosh Dini’s Creating Flow with OmniFocus into Org. And it worked! The idea is be to keep replacing apps with open-source equivalents until making the switch becomes easy. It will probably take years but you have to start somewhere.

• Technology Connections on YouTube: You are being misled about renewable energy technology.
• Silje Grytli Tveten: Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed
• Das Surma: Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering
• Christopher Schwarz: Free Now & Forever: ‘Campaign Furniture’
• Doug Belshaw: The strange magic of the third week

OK, these two are included more for saliency than positivity, but they are also good!

• Michael Lopp: I Hate Fish. Because I am in the middle of a gtd identity crisis
• Akash Bhat: Curate or die. Which is about this very post, and those like it.

Update: Adam Mastroianni’s latest post fits here like a glove.

The final (?) update on my use of the service formerly known as Twitter: I have locked the account and logged out. I shied away from deleting it completely to prevent username squatting. All the posts are still available (and searchable!) thanks to micro.blog’s wonderful import function.

A day full of meetings, so pointing out the update to my now page will likely be my only contribution. Busy times, still.

• Dan Frank: 15 theses on the optimization crisis: or why so many are dissatisfied with society, despite our prosperity. I can but nod along, as I have noted these soul-deadening tendencies myself a few times before. Point number 9 was particularly salient as I read about Robert De Niro’s hotel chains and George Clooney’s old tequila business, perpetuating the cycle of greed and envy.
• David Cain: Maybe the Default Settings Are Too High. An argument for slowing down most things you do, with an emphasis of reading. Pairs nicely with Alan Jacobs' advice on reading, particularly the second paragraph.
• Andrew Gelman: How much of an NBA team’s won-loss record is from skill and how much is luck? Gelman provides a neat step-by-step account of a statistical exploration which you will appreciate even if you are not a basketball fan. Note his advice on slowing down and thinking about what to expect before performing an analysis. After this you will have an idea of how much the practitioners of journalist science leave out in their final write-ups.
• Steve Dylan: How Gemini Gives Me Hope for a Future Internet. No, not Google’s LLM, but a text-based protocol that reimagines how hypertext on the Internet could work. And if it seems cumbersome compared to even “surfing the web” — let alone mindlessly thumbing down a social feed — well, there lies much of the point!
• Charlie Buckland for BBC Wales: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years. Just a feel-good story for the holiday season, to be read slowly and enjoyed.

Bret Terpstra’s Marked 3 Beta is out. As powerful as BBEdit is, I still have to deal with many .docx documents without any reliable way to convert heavily tracked and commented versions to markdown and back. After a quick test, Marked 3 seems to fit the bill. I will happily be a paying customer as soon as Terpstra gives me the opportunity, so here is to a successful launch!

• Adam Mastroianni: So you wanna de-bog yourself. Mastroianni has a playful way with words that is a joy to read regardless of the topic, but this one in particular fits nicely in the New Year resolution-making season. It is Oliver Burkeman-like advice condensed into shorter snippets, for those who have not yet reached middle age.
• David Allen (or whoever writes his newsletter): The biggest secret about goal setting. Note that there is a big difference between setting your own personal goals and the several steps-removed goals that management gives to their teams. The bit about changing the saliency landscape applies to both.
• Yann LeCun: “the concept (of general intelligence) is compete BS”; the Nobel prize winner Demis Hassabis disagrees. But the fourth paragraph of that rebuttal is precisely what LeCun was talking about (mistaking specific for the general because it has “general” in the name).
• Karl Schroeder: Stop Thinking. ⊕ ᔥJohn Naughton On the difference between “understanding” — which is the analytical method that the people in the rationalist community, LLMs, and Mr. Spock do extremely well — and “reasoning”, which I understand (hah!) to be more akin to Charlie Munger’s mental models, applied intuitively, fluidly, and to the rationalist’s eyes haphazardly. Feel free to apply this distinction to the debate one bullet point above.
• Lily Lynch: Serbia’s Vučić Enters Deeper International Isolation. Could not have happened to a more deserving person! Although of course this means nothing but bad news for my fatherland so I wish El Presidente all the best in the New Year and may what is left of his reign be peaceful if not very long.

Infrastructure weekend continues. After changing the fonts, I have decided to simplify the color scheme and (finally!) change the name of the blog from micro.blog’s default, which was my own name, to the “Infinite Regress” heading. My name standing there in big bold letters looked a bit too self-promotional.

Of course, that means that there are now two Infinite Regress blogs — here is the old one — but I guess I will have to reconcile that some other time. The original idea was to post small updates here and keep the old domain for a digital garden-like website, but then I realized that 1) I don’t care much for digital gardens, and 2) there are enough self-referential links here to justify the name. And I already had the infinity symbol up in front of untitled posts. Easy decision.

None of this should matter if you are following along via RSS, which is in fact my preferred method and the reason why these updates are so overdue. Unfortunately, the Tufte theme side notes and margin notes don’t transfer well to feed readers and end up looking like an unintentional insertion. This is item number 1 for my next infrastructure weekend. Number 2 would be figuring out which domain name forwards where. Number 3, of course, is world domination.

My font fiddling continues. Google fonts as recommended by ChatGPT are out, Charter, Cooper Hewitt and Source Code Pro as recommended by Matthew Butterick in his delightful Practical Typography are in. Next up, the color scheme.