• 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.

📚 Finished reading: Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith. An important topic — how do new technologies impact society and what can we do about it — covered in style so bland it makes corporate jargon stunning by comparison. That is what you get by being Microsoft’s General Counsel: a long list of people you would rather not offend, and an imperative to make your employer look good.

I want to do more to support blogrolls and recommendations between the apps. Need to explore this more. For the API, there is a very sparse help page here which I’ll be expanding later this week.

That was Manton Reece in response to my question about Inkwell, an RSS feed reader. And with that sparse help page, Gemini sucesfully completed my request to create “Inkling”, an Emacs client for Inkwell which uses Microbe to compose posts with quoted text, as I’m doing now. It can even bookmark posts using micro.blog bookmarking service.

Dave Winer wondered how he would fit Inkwell into his life. Thanks to Manton’s continued use of open APIs — and with much help from Gemini — I don’t have such dilemmas.

Update: inkling.el is now available on Github, on the Microbe project page. Inkling depends on Microbe for the auth token, so anyone brave enough to try may as well get both!

• Vladimir Campos: The em dash is not an AI thing — have you ever read a book?

As a heavy em dash user myself, I can only concur.

• Kieran Healy: Using Quarto to Write a Book.

Healy will soon have a new book out, or rather a revised edition of his book about data visualization. Quarto is the open-source Rube Goldberg machine he used to create it. Particularly salient was the transformation of Quarto’s output into professional print, which unlike the online version required much human judgement and fiddling. Yay for humans, and yay for physical books .

• Sharon Lohr: AI vs. Undergraduate Statistics Students.

Lohr passess Gemini through the same gauntlet of tests her students went through. The more abstract the task the worse it gets, particularly with regards to critical thinking. Kind of important if we want generative AI to perform peer review! Though again, the state of human peer review is bad enough that I don’t think it would be that much worse.

• Daniel Sell: How To Stop Jumping Ship.

Or rather, how to keep the independent blog community going. He had me at “Screw Discord”.

• Ian Betteridge: Zen fascists will control you… (sic!)

The same thoughts have crossed my mind and even though I keep calling it the naturalistic fallacy, Wikipedia says that the correct term is appeal to nature. However you call it: homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto, in its widest interpretation.

Unlike most of PKD’s work, this was my first time reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I wonder what my thoughts would have been a few decades ago had I gotten to it at the same time as the rest of his novels, but now I cannot help but admire what Dick achieved and how prescient he was, yet again.

The first achievement was to do with words what Satoshi Kon did with images in all of his works, Paprika most of all. Perspectives change and timelines shift mid-sentence, delirious hallucinations become matter-of-fact reality, all without losing the reader. This is only ocassionaly done for comedy; more often, the result is horror of the Lovecraftian kind — Eldritch is right there in the title. One can only imagine what Kon would have done with this book, or with Dick’s similarly reality-bending Ubik. I am, of course, not the first person to have made this observation.

The second was to see what the religion of conumerism will bring, decades before it become obvious to everyone else: alienation, blurred reality, despair. Their physical manifestations — (a metal hand, artifical eyes, deformed jaw — are the titular three stigmata. The Man in the High Castle had religious undertones; fitting for a book of its title, The Three Stigmata… brandishes a religious foghorn.

The third, unintentional achievement, was to bring into focus what I find particularly pernicious about LLMs: I get a visceral reaction, revulsion, to its common turns of phrase. Is this not a good thing, you ask? After all, it kept me off Xitter and most of Substack, which are now inundated with computer-generated text. But no, the revulsion is there even in texts written years ago: this has to be AI, I say to myself, only to see that the article was from 2018. Much like Dick’s protagonists who keep questioning their reality and see the Eldritch stigmata in everyone and everyhing, even themselves, long after exposure to the transcendental drug which is the book’s McGuffin, I have overcalibratted my bullshit detector to find fault in the most innocuous turns of phrase.

Worst of all: am I myself now writing things that someone will mistake for AI — instead of human — slop?

The titular “it” is enshitification, particularly of the “let’s digitize everything” type.

Next year will be a full decade since my initial board certification in oncology, and with that comes another set of multiple choice questions for quarterly completion. We can debate whether ABIM’s MOC scheme is fair — I think not — but still being the law of the land, it led me to think about board prep for the first time since 2018, when I completed my hematology boards.

Being an over-preparer (as people who finish medical school tend to be), I started looking into the size and cost of ASCO-SEP “ASCO” is the American Society of Clinical Oncology. “SEP” stands for “Self-Evaluation Program”. “ASCO-SEP” was something oncology fellowship programs gave to their trainees free of charge some time during their second or third year of fellowship to get them ready for the board exam. This was less from the goodness of their hearts and more because fellowships were graded — and to the best of my knowledge still are — on the percent of their graduates who pass the boards on the first attempt. A rate lower than around 80% would raise all sorts of flags and could lead to audits, suspensions and even closures. So, mid and low-tier programs would overselect on good test takers during fellowship match season, with interesting consequences (the discussion of which is better left for some other time). and was dismayed to learn that it is no longer a physicial book published every 3 or so years which one could use as a reference, doorstop or paper weight long after passing the boards, but rather a 12-month digital subscription with no option for a print copy. You would think that ditching print would lead to all sorts of dematerialization efficiencies — no typesetting, no printing, storage, etc — that could potentially lower the price and make it more affordable for everyone. Alas, if there were any efficiencies to begin with, they didn’t trickle down to the end-user: the cost of subscription for members if $550. And did I mention it was only for a year? Enshittification in action.

ASCO’s quirky sibling is ASH, the American Society of Hematology, which publishes ASH-SAP. “SAP” is for “Self-Assessment Program”, and the fact that they chose different acronyms for the same thing tells you much about the world of medicine. It is a smaller organization with fewer members yet it managed to put out a print copy for $60 over the digital-only offering — a more than fair price for a textbook. This is not the first time ASH has been on the right side of history.

So if anyone knows anyone in the ASCO leadership, please nudge them over to the ASH approach. Maybe you can mention ASH-SAP explicitly and let mimetic forces do their magic. And if you can influence decisions at ASH, whatever you do don’t highlight that ASCO-SEP is digital-only and please don’t talk about efficiencies, lockup and similar matters lest hematologists get any wrong ideas.

iCloud on the web is surprisingly good. The only thing missing is iMessage, which should have been there instead of the never-used Invites app. It feels like it was created just to fill up that spot in the 4x3 rectangle.

AI is currently entering our civilization as a synthetic, dazzling image of a fire projected on a wall, and the tech people are saying “look, it’ll cook everything and keep you warm” as you stand wearing mittens holding a raw steak. Meanwhile, you watch those same people drown the embers of the ancestral hearth fire, around which you once gathered with your family while the chowder-pot simmered, with gallons of freezing water.

There also needs to be accountability: Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg should go to prison. I’m not even sure for what, but these men are clearly the kind of person the world’s folkloric traditions warn us about, demonic and hollow, a threat to the social order. We need deterrence, because right now people look up to these guys and aspire to be like them.

AI serves as a source of cheap and “good enough” intellectual and emotional labor. Since we increasingly don’t provide that stuff to each other through systems because they have been plundered by rich people, AI plays an important social role. It is to thinking and feeling what McDonald’s is to eating.

If we’re living in a crisis of loneliness, bad mental health, and plummeting media literacy, then the arts are the number-one thing that can help solve those issues.

Here is Walker’s article, and here is the Slop Tax proposal from one Mike Pepi, whose Substack-hosted blog posts are delightfully short.

After reading Apple in China and deciding to decouple from Apple, I started asking Google Gemini how to replace my favorite MacOS apps with their Linux equivalents. I have been a vim person from way back but always had Emacs org-mode in the back of mind so a replacement for OmniFocus came first. Replacing MailMate with mu4e — another Emacs addon — was a close second.

Once you learn about the Emacs hammer everything starts looking like a nail, including blog post management. My blogging tool of choice on MacOS is Daniel Jalkut’s MarsEdit, and my experience with mu4e made me think a similar approach could work with micro.blog’s APIs. Now, I know nothing about those APIs nor about Lisp, which is the Emacs scripting language of choice. But Gemini was fluent in both, so it was trivial to instruct it!

It took two tries for each of the main functions I had in mind (full text search, tagging auto-complete, quick copying of the published URL, easy image attachment) but also to get the basic look and feel right, emoji being the most challenging to implement correctly. Even with all that I spent less than 3 hours to have more or less in shape for using and sharing. The single leftover feature, drafts, I don’t use often enough to spend even a few minutes on, but I may get to it at some point.

Microbe.el is available on GitHub. Note that it is completely LLM-generated (Google Gemini) so please approach it with some caution, but also do with it as you please. Many thanks to Manton Reece for creating and stewarding micro.blog and making it as open as it is. Thanks also to Daniel Jalkut for making MarsEdit.

• Chris Arnade: What Holds America Together?

The best description of the conundrum America is in and the future of the American dream I have seen, accounting for the difference between “thin” (superficial) and “thick” culture. Good bit about immigration too:

Our tolerance for thin differences is also why immigration works better here than in other countries. That is especially true of front-row immigrants (highly educated), since they are leaving cultures they didn’t fit into at a thick level (entrepreneurial). They have self selected for being a natural American, at a thick level.

My own thoughts about and experience with immigration and the American dream match the above.

• Jessica Hullman: Living the metascience dream (or nightmare) with AI for science.

AI begets AI, as previously noted. Papers will be “safer”. Nuance will be lost. The comments to the post are just as enlightening.

• Paris Marx: Sam Altman’s anti-human worldview.

No nuance here either. Altman is so unabashedly anti-human that any of his public appearances are right out of a CS Lewis essay or story.

• Terry Godier: Current.

A new RSS reader ⊕ ↬John Gruber which I am yet to check out. I do like the idea behind it, which tries to tame Dave Winer’s river of news a full two decades after he described the concept. I am less enthusiastic about the website copy: there is so much of it, and it is written in just such a way that it smells strongly of LLM assistance. I don’t think I mind it that much — though my skin still crawls when I see a “not this but that” phrase — and will chalk it up to the font-overload era of 1990s computing when we were just figuring out how to use the many typefaces available.