• Scott Sumner: Too good to be true. Sumner has a PhD in economics and a storied academic career but you don’t need either to confirm his observation that Congress punishes savers and rewards spendthrifts. And in that they are merely following the current animal spirits of the country: behold credit scores plummeting when you pay off your mortgage. Cui bono?
• Joan Westenberg: The “Passive Income” trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs. Certainly not the poor shmucks setting up yet another Amazon enshitiffier dropshipping storefront. As Westenberg points out, far worse than their job of enshittifying my online shopping experience is the opportunity cost: what could have these would-be entrepreneurs done had they not paid $1,000 for a get-rich-quick course? And if you liked that article, do see her [Notes on going solo][2a]. The mind bristles with possible applications for a solo practice.
• Aidan Walker: what would Whitman do?. And what could possibly be more American than a solo practice? After all, it is a country that emphasizes individuality over the communal for better or worse. But of course culture changes all the time and as eternal as this state of affairs seems to have been, Walker reminds us that it is no older than the second half of the 20th century. Before then, and certainly in the time of Lincoln, the themes were:

Nature worship, creative self-assertion, and loving solidarity. This mystic trinity is the foundation of American democracy, which was really founded by Lincoln and not Washington. Liberalism is something they invented in Europe.

• Jorge Arango: Robots in the Garden. But with solidarity dead or dying we have LLMs to turn to. Behold a proposed collective of 9 algorithms to serve as your amanuenses. This may even make me go back to computer note-taking! Arango has a book about that very topic, now on the pile.

• Lily Lynch: Birthday Baffler. This is little more than a call-out to her article Yugoslavia Calling, about the world’s first Internet war(s). Well, it’s one more thing: a note that today is Lynch’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Lily!
• Branko Milanović: Yuri Andropov: A man who could have become another Deng Xiaoping…or not. Leave it to Milanović to write an engrossing, educational and highly relevant review of a 40-year-old book. His own Capitalism, Alone from 2019 has also aged quite well.
• Bryan Vartabedian: Three Bottlenecks in Healthcare Delivery. Ah, we have come to the AI section of the link list. This one is about creating abundance in health care and all I could think of while reading the article was the Isaac Asimov quote from 1953: “It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem.”
• Adam Mastroianni: Infinite midwit. The titular midwit is your friendly neighborhood LLM, because Mastroianni shares my observations about the ChatGPT style of writing. As a semi-professional writer, he is more relieved that he won’t be out of work any time soon than frustrated that he keeps encountering dreck. Oh well.
• Ruxandra Teslo: The Bureaucracy Blocking the Chance at a Cure. Teslo asks for more abundance. The Asimov quote a few bullet points up still stands, though it is only a matter of degree that is unknown: we know full well what kind of shenanigans releasing the brakes on early-stage trials would unleash. Again, letting China do it would be a sign of maturity.
• Kyla Scanlon: The Ozempicization of the Economy. I don’t know which part of this hot-take smorgasbord I liked more: Scanlon’s digs at the “prediction” “markets”, her overview of “The Manosphere” (I watched the first 10 minutes of Theroux’s documentary and promptly turned it off as it was little different from watching the actual TikTok videos), or her observations on the most recent war. So, I will only re-quote one MG Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, who per Scanlon tweeted (confusing em-dash spacing included):

We are aware of what is happening in the paper oil market, including the firms hired to influence oil futures. We also see the broader jawboning campaign. But let’s see if they can turn that into “actual fuel” at the pump —or maybe even print gas molecules!

Tee hee.

• Ernie Smith for Tedium: Self-Hosting: Still Worth It?. For some this will be a costly read — and yet still worth it.
• Chris Arnade: Japan: America’s Best Ally? Yelling “Takaichi!” while holding up both thumbs will be my go-to way for getting out of uncomfortable conversations.
• Aishwarya Khanduja and Stuart Buck: The Economy of Knowing: Why Metascience Needs Micro and Macro. At what point does it stop being metascience and becomes applied economics? When you start calling it “macro”, says I.
• Andrew Gelman: Why and how to do Bayes for clinical trials: Our comments on the recent FDA draft guidance, and reactions to two comments by others. People are flabbergasted that the FDA came out with a sensible proposal.
• Anna Moore: Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion. Ben Thompson was the proverbial canary for LLM delusions and Microsoft did him a favor when they nerfed Sydney.
• The Back Focus channel on YouTube: Jim Downey, the Character Actor? | Acting Breakdown. The title is, of course, a play on “Jeff Epstein, the New York financier”, the viewing of which may be the best 2 minutes 16 seconds you will spend today.

• Scott Sumner: Paid subscriptions. His blog, “The Pursuit of Happiness”, will be mostly behind a paywall moving forward. Unfortunate but completely expected: the Monetize button on all these platforms is a Chekhov gun waiting to go off. Remember, that is why friends don’t let friends write on substack.
• Harry Crane: Prediction Markets: Real Financial Assets or just Sports Betting? Clearly the latter, although Crane makes a valiant effort to portray them in a more positive light. Of course, the sole purpose of these markets is for various figures on the periphery of America’s current, shameful administration to convert some of that shame into more fungible assets.
• Paolo Benanti: American heresy: should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake? An AI-generated translation from the original French essay about the consequences of Thiel’s project to “monetize mimetic desire on a planetary scale”. Separately, for all the bones I have to pick with South Park, I enjoyed their Peter Thiel storyline a bit too much.
• And as a palate-cleanser, Doomscroll 41: David Wengrow, in which Joshua Citarella talks to the co-author of The Dawn of Everything.

• Venkatesh Rao: Rediscovering Irony. I have had people call me cynical since early childhood, where I was merely being ironic. Rao notes one thing humans excel at that LLMs can’t do is irony — yay! — though he limits his discussion of irony in religion to Hinduism. Isn’t Christianity supremely ironic?
• Anna Havron: The Haunted Smart House. Ghosts in the machine, and there will be more and more of them.
• Aidan Walker: who is “you” in a livestream? I have never listened to this Nick Fuentes person but he sounds like a complete douchebag. What could he possibly have against board games?
• Ernie Smith: The Pancake Discussion. Not the analogy I would have gone with since pancakes are too wholesome to stand in for social media. If they were a food I would imagine they would be Twizzlers: silly, tasteless, pointless empty calories.
• Doug Belshaw on Thought Shrapnel: How to stop thinking. Neat trick.
• And a YouTube bonus: Larry King schools Norm on iron. Hey, that’s how I pronounce it!

A missed parenthesis obliterating all reference-style markdown links in this post along with other people’s attempts, good and bad, finally pushed me to add a proofreading step before hitting C-c C-c in Microbe. In the latest version, a C-c C-p will send the draft post to Gemini 2.5 Flash with this prompt: ⊕ The prompt itself was, of course, suggested by Gemini 3.1 Pro, as was all of the actual LISP code to implement proofreading.

You are a strict, technical copy-editor. Your ONLY job is to fix spelling mistakes, typographical errors, and invalid Markdown and Hugo shortcode syntax. You MUST NOT alter the author’s voice, style, phrasing, vocabulary, or structural choices. Output ONLY the corrected text. Do not add conversational filler, introductions, or explanations.

The main reason for the step were annoying shortcode mistakes that would lead to mangled posts, or even more often posts not even making it through Micro.blog’s build leading to minutes (minutes!) spent digging through error logs. But of course there were many, many more spelling mistakes. Last week’s Clara Barton post alone had a whopping 14!

⊕ So much red…

Whatever Gemini sends back, Emacs shows in split-screen view with errors in the old text marked in red and the new and improved version marked below in green. For each change, an a accepts and a d declines the suggestion. Easy!

Having said goodbye to Google years ago I can see the irony in picking Gemini to be my go-to LLM and at some point I will switch to an offline model, Doctorow-style. Until then, Gemini is it, thanks to the blandness of Google and its reliability (and it is saying something about the competition when the master of killing services for no good reason is reliable by comparisson).

I

Last year, I replaced my Apple Watch with a Casio F-91W, a marvel of engineering. Terry Godier has just posted an essay, ⊕ ᔥJohn Gruber beautifully designed, about the merits of that very model over any smart watch you can get. By the topic, message, look and feel of the article I should love it. Instead, I get a visceral reaction when I come across a passage like this:

And that absence, the peace of a thing that does what it does and then shuts up, feels like the most luxurious thing I own.

Not because it’s retro. Not because it’s minimal.

Because it’s done.

And also these two passages, back to back:

Most of your screen time isn’t leisure. It isn’t addiction. It isn’t even a choice.

It’s maintenance.

Your phone is not a slot machine.

It’s a to-do list that writes itself.

Godier recently came out with Current, an RSS reader for iOS whose product pages resembles the Casio essay in both language and design. Not surprising — the author is the same — but it did have a certain smell to it, a cadence of nots and buts that made me think when I first read that it was written by generative AI first, edited by a human second. The sheer length of the copy, leisurely meandering around the topic like the Colorado river’s double oxbow, made me think this was not the work of a software developer who would probably rather spend time polishing their app than designing scrollable eye candy.

But hey, Godier makes software first, writes second. If generative LLMs help them make better software more quickly, and then they use the same tool for something that is not their primary occupation, then who am I to judge?

II

Two days ago, I linked to “Lobster Boil”, an essay from Om Malik about the rise of OpenClaw. This is a typical passage:

AI can be personal. Not a service you subscribe to. Not a platform you visit. A thing that runs on your machine, serves your intentions, uses the model you choose, and works through the apps you already live in

And here is a passage from Malik’s “Neo Symbolic Capitalism”:

Which is why Twitter, now X, feels unbeatable despite everything. It is not because the product is superior. It is because the people with the most power and the most to gain have turned it into a gaming platform for symbolic capital. They are not users. They are players. And the game is very, very good to them.

A sentiment I can get behind! But the style still makes my skin crawl. There are 13 “nots” and 4 “buts” in Malik’s essay. His 2024 “Silicon Valley’s Empathy Vacuum” has not a single “not”, and a single lonely “but”.

Om Malik used to write for a living.

III

This morning I was browsing my RSS feeds — via Inkling for Inkwell, of course — when I saw Doug Belshaw’s post about his 7-step approach for authentic AI-assisted blogging. Belshaw also writes the wonderful Thought Shrapnel blog, quoted here many times, so I was keen to learn more. I was sad to see that, among the seven steps, the one that generated the first draft of the post was relegated to AI. There is a human rewrite then, followed by evaluation of the final text by GPTzero.me to see how much humanity that rewrite managed to instill.

I mean, what are we even doing here?

The byline for Belshaw’s articles should be “Perplexity”, who should then thank Doug for giving them the idea, reading the first draft of the article, and helping them with revisions. Belshaw mentions in his 7-step guide that Cory Doctorow was panned when he shared his own approach to LLM assistance in writing. Doctorow has AI proof-read his already written articles. This approach I can understand and will indeed start implementing one of these days: there have been one too many instances of extra parenthesis screwing up my Markdown, not to mention run-on sentences, unintentional non sequiturs and the like.

IV

I have written quite a few first drafts of scientific articles, and have revised countless more. The first draft is harder by far, but is also the one that makes the biggest mark. It sets the tone and, unless you have a particularly sadistic co-author who has the actual article already written and ready to use as redline all over your first attempt, will make the most of the final product.

Everything Godier, Malik and Belshaw write can and will be used to teach other LLMs about how to write. The first-draft approach to LLM assistance is creating the AI ouroboros. I’d rather not be around to see it fully manifest.

John Gruber had to write an AppleScript to ‘Save MarsEdit Document to Text File’. With Microbe, my 99% Gemini-generated first attempt to create a Micro.blog client in Emacs, this function came built in without my having to specify it. ⊕ Now, I am yet to add an actual Draft status to the Microbe posts. But since I post these as soon as I write them without much time left to simmer, for better or worse, this has not been a priority. Since the interface for composing posts is just another Emacs buffer you can save it as a text file as you would any other buffer: with a C-x C-s. Which is to say, Ctrl-x, then Ctrl-s. Emacs’ propensity towards shortcuts extends to the text descriptions of the shortcuts themselves.

The functionality comes for free, but let’s face it Emacs is not the prettiest thing to look at right out of the box, and to my knowledge there is no way to beautify that toolbar. I had a feeling it was the antithesis to Gruber’s design sense, and that was indeed the case as far back as 2002 when he described it as being “at opposing end of the spectrum” from his favorite text editor, BBEdit. Of course, some implementations are worse than others. There was a positive mention, albeit indirectly, when Gruber quoted from an interview with Donald Knuth. In it, Knuth mentioned that:

I have special Emacs modes to help me classify all the tens of thousands of papers and notes in my files, and special Emacs keyboard shortcuts that make bookwriting a little bit like playing an organ.

This is the power of Emacs: to make you forget about its (lack of) interface because it is the Hole Hawg of text, all the more powerful now that generative AI can create custom modes in a blink. You will look at it in awe even as it leaves you dangling from a ladder.

• Sarah Perez for TechChrunch: Kagi brings its ‘small web’ of a human-only internet to mobile devices.

I have been on the Kagi family plan since January 2024 and can strongly endorse their search service. Only later did I discover that they had Serbian roots which oly made my endorsment stronger. ⊕ The company had at some point sent out free T-shirts to subscribers, featuring their delightful dog mascot. Being bright yellow, our daughter promptly stole it from me and started wearing it at school (another one she snatched was the yellow gold Hypercritical shirt, and I think there is a pattern there). One day at school when they were learning about globalization, their teacher had them look at their shirt labels. She was wearing the Kagi shirt, and to her surprise it said “Made in Serbia”, the village of Arilje to be exact. This bloog has been on their small web list for a while, but only since two days ago did I start noticing a double-digit influx of traffic. Welcome, all who stumble upon this writing.

• Gregory Meyer for the FT: Big bargains and ‘white knuckle’ buying: inside the rise of TJ Maxx.

TJ Max and Marshall’s are, next to Costco, the favorite stores of our family’s wise shopper. This article explains why, and the mastery of their buyers is reflected in the stock price. Also reflected in the price is the decline of Macy’s, which according to my wife exists only to satisfy the need of clueless international tourists to shop there based on branding alone — at least in their DC locations.

• M. John Harrison for The Guardian: The Delusions by Jenni Fagan review – an afterlife of queues and bureaucracy

This is the book he recommends, with an excerpt on Harrison’s blog. Yes, it is on the pile

• Nick Maggiulli: Why Private School Isn’t Worth the Cost.

Because people who can get it are connected enough and well-off enough that it doesn’t make an iota of difference, except in reducing the anxiety of their striving parents. You can guess, based on the tone, where our own kids go to school.

• Om Malik: Lobster Boil.

I could not care less about OpenClaw, but Malik’s whole article reeks of undisclosed LLM-generated text. Were those original algorithms over-trained on his writing? Wouldn’t be the first time that style got to me

• Richard Griffiths: Two Million Notes and No Dictionary: Learning from Semyon Vengerov’s Cautionary Tale.

“Russian bibliographer Semyon Vengerov (1855-1920) spent his life accumulating two million filing cards, but he died before he finished the dictionaries and bibliographies he set out to create.” Was it worth it? Well, had he completed his work maybe he would have been more known in Russia, but I doubt he would have inspired half as many blog posts. Here is to being a punch line.

• Raghuveer Parthasarathy: Space mirrors, solar panels, fools, and their money.

A few months ago I noted that the one of the main reasons biotech was not like tech was its almost unlimited freedom do bullshit. Well, people are able to raise money by BS in other areas as well, as this article shows, but an order of magnitude less because most investors are able to do back of the envelope calculations.

• Bryan Vartabedian: The Measure of Everything.

A take on Goodhart’s Law as applied to medicine, this time through the lens of instrumentalisation. If any of these articles tickle you and you haven’t yet read Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, please do so now. Ted Gioia recently wrote about the book and its legacy. As an occasional note-taker I am in the minority club of Lila fans as well, though both of Pirsig’s books are due for a re-read.

• James Olds: The Chronology Problem.

The point is in the subtitle: “how our bias towards recency in scientific discovery hurts our understanding”. It rings true, and even reminded me of the 26 years it took for CRISPR/Cas systems to travel the path from an oddity to a gene editing platform, until I realized that those 26 years were not spent idling as this review in Cell describes in detail. So, the (lack of) developments in theoretical biology would be a much better example.

• Phil Price: Ted Williams and Me.

Ted Williams was, apparently, a base-ball player about whom John Updike had this to say: “For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.” This applies to any profession you can imagine, and indeed things outside of one’s professional life. People who have the inner drive to do things well even in the absence of stakes could unkindly be called “perfectionists”, but let’s remember that they are the ones who keep the wheels of civilization in motion, in opposition to the hordes of blankfaces, lazy asses and morons.