• Kyla Scanlon for the NYT: It Is Trump’s Casino Economy Now. You’ll Probably Lose. Left unsaid is what fuels it: the self-reinforcing duo of greed and envy.
• Lily Lynch: The Curtain Falls on Aleksandar Vučić’s Foreign Policy “Balancing Act” I wish I could consider this good news. Alas, “king” Aleksandar’s reign was full of pathos and drama tinged with blood, so it is hard to see its end being any different.
• The anonymous person behind “Applied Divinity Studies”: Peter Thiel and the Antichrist. A brief defense of Peter Thiel including zingers like “Since technology can progress, it may eventually become powerful enough to kill everyone. But a force capable of regulating this technology would be at least as powerful, and stagnation comes with its own dangers”. What dangers, the essay doesn’t say. I suspect the biggest one is to Mr. Thiel’s pocketbook.
• Ernie Smith: The Sky Is Falling, The Web Is Dead. A deep dive into one analyst’s history of making false claims. Motivated reasoning is a powerful force, particularly when the motive is money.
• Daniel Kolitz for Harper’s Magazine: The Goon Squad. A scary story about a particular corner of the Internet. Warning: there are some graphic depictions of despair that may be distressing for people who have children and now have to worry about protecting them from the bottomless pits of porn. Make no mistake that this, too, is fueled by greed.

• autoeq.app which will give you the most pleasing equalizier settings for your brand of headphones and EQ software
• QuickNotes, a simple voice transcription app for iOS from Matt Birchler
• Luminar, unapologetically Japanese photo editing software
• Andrej Karpathy’s interview with Dwarkesh Patel, for a dose of techno-realism
• The Empire Podcast, for its 10-part series on Gaza

Have a good weekend, all.

A prediction, based on nothing but this short post from John Gruber and a hunch: within 5 years, Apple will have a deal to stream all college football. NFL may be out of reach, but for many people — Tim Cook included — NCAA is what matters.

• Derek Lowe: Where Do We Stand With “Liver-on-a-Chip” Technology?. It helps, but we are nowhere near replacing animal toxicology models with in vitro, let alone in silico assays. Now, that’s toxicology. I would have a much lower threshold for throwing out the window all those animal models of disease, particularly when testing any treatment that works wholly or in part via the host immune system. Those quickly turn into Rube Goldberg machines — good for intellectual stimulation, useless for inference.
• Brian Potter: Why Are So Many Pedestrians Killed by Cars in the US? A marvelous exploration of data that doesn’t point to a single cause but does more or less absolve phones while painting a big red “X” onto SUVs and (pedestrians taking) drugs. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
• Dan Snow: Secretive vendors are exploiting a free money glitch in the U.S. healthcare system. As much as it makes my blood boil to see this kind of profiteering in health care, ultimately Americans spend so much because they get so much, at least in terms of volume and technology if not outcomes. It may not be evenly distributed or even effective, but you get what you ask for. If anyone wants a different profile of health care spending they should look at some other people.
• Boone Ashworth and Kylie Robison for The Wire: I Hate My Friend. I saw these adds on the New York Subway a few weeks ago and wondered who on Earth would be crazy enough to wear an always-on microphone, and who would be delusional enough to think it could be a successful product. (ᔥJohn Naughton)
• Andrew Gelman: Uncanny academic valley: Brian Wansink as proto-chatbot. An article headline from last month asked what kind of an Age we lived in. “Despair” was my suggestion but I now take it back — the answer is clearly “bullshit”.

• José Luis Ricón: Systems Biology: understanding beyond genes. With an eye towards aging, but broadly applicable to much of medicine. As ever, there is a relevant xkcd comic on the topic (ᔥDerek Lowe).
• L. M. Sacasas: The One Best Way Is a Trap. “So, once again I invite us to ask a simple question: Is there, in fact, “one best way” in every realm of experience? And even if there were, at what cost would we discover it? And what would we gain? Might it be that in the course of pursuing the “one best way,” we would lose our way in a more profound sense?”
• Anthony DiGiorgio on X: Imagine we mandated everyone have car insurance that covers new tires, oil changes, and wiper fluid. I think you can guess where this is going, and he is not wrong. The cost of health care is skyrocketing because we are always finding new ways to spend money, and isn’t America a society of maximizers?
• Kyla Scanlon: Who’s Getting Rich Off Your Attention? Robert Reich responds, on Bluesky.
• Bonus: Tyler Cowen doubles down on min-maxing the society in his brief comment on Sora 2. “Still, from my distance it seems quite possible that the “slop” side of the equation is a simple way to fund AI “world-modeling” (and other) skills in a manner that is cross-subsidized by the consumers of the slop.” That way may be simple, but also quite diabolical.

Burn it.

This year’s macOS and iOS updates have been disastrous. My M1 MacBook Air is slowed down to a crawl, with sound completely broken. I need two extra taps to do anything on the phone. And for what? An inconsistent, superfluous anti-user interface effect made for TikTok and Instagram, not humans.

• Jasmine Sun: 🌻 are you high-agency or an NPC? Life in San Francisco, as depicted here, sounds absolutely horrifying. It is a beautiful city and if you can afford to live there without getting involved in tech you should absolutely check it out, but sheesh. (ᔥJohn Naughton)
• Alexey Guzey: I ran out of money a year ago, spent the last of my savings on a prostitute in Hong Kong, and became a commie. Intentionally provocative headline for an article that ends with: “If there’s at least one thing I learned this year, it’s that even when I’m completely useless to the world, it’s not going to abandon me. And I wish nothing more than to make sure that every single human, no matter who and where they are, knew this too.” Especially if you choose to live in San Francisco!
• Steven Johnson: The Blank Page Revolution. Begins as a review of Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (which I also liked) then delves into the importance of paper as a material. I would read Johnson’s book on paper, if he were ever to write one.
• Anil Dash: How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs. He sure did. I don’t hate liquid glass but I also don’t see the point, and that is just the tip of the iceberg for Apple’s missed chances to make a difference. “Sugar water” indeed.
• Chris Arnade: Final thought on Australia. He links to the three preceding articles as well, and each and every one of them is well worth your time. The finale begins thusly: “I went to Australia expecting little, on a whim to escape the heat of August and travel crowds, and I’ve never been more wrong about a place. I had assumed I’d be bored by the bougie, but instead I found an endlessly fascinating country that, even after a month of travel, I only scratched the surface of, and now sitting here typing this, I am happily dreaming about returning to.” And now I want to go!

Note: four of the five websites above are on Substack. I don’t like Substack. But it is so much of a behemoth that people you would least expect, like Nassim Taleb, are dipping their toes. The implications of even him abdicating to the winner of the most recent round of tech roulette are dire — yet another thing I should write about more, when time allows.

I nod my head agreeing with much of what Tyler Cowen says and writes, but the points where he is off are not minor. Here he is a few weeks ago, on a new RCT banning smartphones in the classroom showing (very) modest improvements in grades:

Note with grades there is “an average increase of 0.086 standard deviations.” I have no problem with these policies, but it mystifies me why anyone would put them in their top five hundred priorities, or is that five thousand?

He also points to an older trial from Norway, which had similar results. Cowen frames the bans as tiny gains for unknown and potentially enormous cost. And student comments like the following he found worthy enough to repost:

As an academically successful student in a pretty well ranked high school my recollection was that the entire experience was horrible and torturous and essentially felt like being locked up in prison. The pace of teaching was also so slow that the marginal value add of being in class was essentially 0 when compared to the textbook reading I would do after school anyway.

So… yes it was nice to have a phone and I don’t care if it distracts stupid students from learning.

And here is Rana Foroohar in this morning’s FT, under the headline Trump’s war on America’s schools:

[Randi] Weingarten, those of you reading outside the US could be forgiven for not knowing, is the head of America’s second-largest teachers’ union. In her new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, she lays out some of the history of authoritarian backlash against public education and its teachers, from the post-civil war Reconstruction era in the US, to Europe in the 1930s, to Vladimir Putin’s justification of crackdowns on teachers and universities in Russia (“wars are won by . . . schoolteachers”).

She also quotes the Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer, who found that a lack of “critical thinking” made people more receptive to authoritarian leaders. As he put it, “the very last thing an authoritarian leader wants is for his followers to start using their heads”. Or, as Trump so memorably put it after a 2016 primary win: “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

Reading is going out of fashion, but I would urge the student above, and Tyler Cowen, and everyone else who thinks eaking out marginal gains for top-performing students is worth the cost of “distracting stupid students from learning”, to (re)read Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas or — if they have more time — Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov which served as an inspiration with this passage in particular:

“I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?”

And some may agree (I don’t)! But of course the equilibrium is not in focusing all of the world’s misery into a single person, as it tends to spread out, and you can’t lock up those exposed in a dank basement like the citizens of Omelas did. Rather, those people get to vote, and not in a way you may like.

Sascha Fast of the Zettelkasten blog writes, in a post titled The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything”:

Rowlands et al. wrote about the so called “digital natives” that they lack the critical and analytical thinking skills to evaluate the information they find on the internet. We need a fully developed mental map of the subject in order to derive value from the results of an internet search.

In short: You need a trained brain to actually benefit from the internet.

But not just from the internet, as the post elaborates. This applies equally or even more to LLM outputs. A great example comes from a recent post on Andrew Gelman’s blog, though not from the man himself, where a human and ChatGPT 5 both try to improve upon a statistical model in a new-to-me language called Stan. Now if you don’t know Bayesian statistics or Stan this will all look like gobbledygook and ChatGPT won’t help you understand.

LLMs are also seeping into the everything-bucket software, the one whose primary purpose is to black-hole every article and textbook you will never read or video you will ever watch. Well now it can also give you the illusion of knowledge and control because you can ask questions about the contents. This is something Casey Newton learned this year:

I can give Notion a sprawling question like “how did the Cambridge Analytica case resolve” and get a good summary of regulatory actions across several years and countries. And by default, web search is off, meaning I know that its AI systems are drawing only on the vetted journalism that I have saved into my database.

This is a dream come true. I finally have a meaningful way to sift through millions of words of article text, ask follow-up questions, and get citations that I can use in my work. Notion may yet prove to be the AI librarian that Readwise never became.

One more thing I’m trying: I mentioned above that I continue to experiment with different ways to save material that might be useful later. Recently a Reddit post turned me on to Recall, which positions itself as a “self-organizing knowledge base.” Currently available as a web and mobile app, Recall lets you save web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, podcasts, Google Docs, and other materials into a single database that it then organizes on your behalf.

To be clear, I myself have asked for something like this from my everything-bucket software of choice, DEVONthink. And it delivered! But now I am realizing, and Sacha’s post was a good reminder, that these are becoming command line-level power tools — Hole Hawgs of the mind if you will — which can and will do great damage if not used carefully. And unlike the Hole Hawg they are freely available and come with no instruction manual. Caveat utilitor.