I tend to avoid podcasts in the style of Joe Rogan, those that begin with a 15-minute long ad block selling mushroom supplements followed by hours of meandering conversation between two people who may or may not be under the influence. Who in the world has the time?

So for that reason I avoided the podcast of one Dwarkesh Patel even as I occasionally linked to an article of his. I filed him mentally in the same “Avoid!” bucket as Lex Fridman — probably unfairly, as no one in the world can be as big of a mental bore as Fridman — without giving his podcast a chance. Although, judging by his writing on AI, I would not have liked the tone even if I had heard it. I remember, in fact, resisting the temptation to pan some of his more outlandish texts prophesying the rise of our LLM overlords with a tone which was as matter-of-fact as it was uncaring about human culture and society. My headphones are a direct link to my brain and I did not want that kind of world view to influence it.

Well a whole bunch of people are about to get influenc’d, because the New York Times has just published a glowing profile of Patel and his podcast, framing the show as a way to “eavesdrop on the A.I. elite” while burying an important fact — the one that kept me from listening in the first place — in the fourth-to-last paragraph:

Mr. Patel doesn’t see himself as a journalist, and he will do things that news organizations’ ethics rules generally prohibit, such as signing onto an amicus brief on behalf of Anthropic in its recent lawsuit against the Department of Defense, and angel-investing in companies whose founders he has interviewed (he disclosed the stakes). He believes in a “glorious transhumanist future,” and his tone isn’t adversarial. But his admirers say that his technical fluency and extensive preparation enable him to follow up or push back on superficial answers that most interviewers would simply accept. The Jensen Huang episode became heated as Mr. Patel repeatedly challenged the world’s most valuable company’s chief executive on the national-security implications of selling chips to China. “If I do cover a topic,” Mr. Patel says. “I think my reputation would suffer a lot if I don’t ask tough questions or don’t do it in a deep way.”

Of course, praising for this kind of pushback on a transhumanist podcast is like praising the host of “The Ultimate Potato Chip Podcast” for pushing back against Frito-Lay’s most recent price hike: it goes without saying that you like junk food.

But it was not this small bit of confirmation bias which made me link to the NYT. Rather, it was the same revelation that piqued Tyler Cowen’s interest, if for a different reason. Rather than paste the whole excerpt, let me provide a (human) summary: bored during the covid pandemic, a 19-year-old Patel asks the libertarian George Mason economist Bryan Caplan to be a guest on his brand-new podcast; Caplan agrees. They continue the exchange, online and in person, while Caplan is spending months in Austin, TX at the home of his billionaire friend Steve Kuhn. ⊕ This wasn’t the only good billionaire-themed article in the NYT. For more reasons why Americans should probably do a bit more to clip their wings see the travails of one Sergey Brin and the series of hardships he endured that pushed him to the right. Kuhn also meets Patel and, liking the cut of his jib, offers to invest in return for equity. So do other people in the Caplan-Kuhn circle which inevitably expands all the way to your friendly neighborhood founder of Amazon. Cue NYT’s signature glazing.

Crikey. Fans of C.S. Lewis should recognize immediately the themes he raised in The Inner Ring, The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, essays and books which were most likely not on Patel’s reading list during his formative years. One can only wonder whether his belief in “the glorious transhumanist future” came before or after the Silicon Valley billionaires made landfall in his young mind.

• Cory Doctorow: The enshittification multiverse, in which Doctorow proposes a general theory of enshittification to match his initial, special theory. I enthusiastically concur.
• Anonymous on the Marginal Revolution comments section: On health care price transparency. The only non-Xified content you can find on Marginal Revolution these days is in the comments, so I am glad that Cowen highlighted this minute dissection of the madness called American medical billing. Needless to say, I concur.
• Reese Richardson: A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise. ⊕ ᔥAndrew Gelman, who sure loves his mile-long headlines. This is the author’s summary of a more detailed paper in the academic journal PNAS which points to a looming catastrophe of LLM-boosted scientific paper mills holding hands with pliant journal editors to decimate the signal-to-noise ratio of the literature. Of course I concur!
• Cory Doctorow, again: Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance”. His review after actually reading the whole book, and yep.

All I can think of while reading Nilay Patel’s software brain essay, quoted and linked to all over the web, is the slight but dense Metaphors We Live By. Software databases — metaphoric file cabinets and manila folders — now themselves becoming metaphors for physical objects is truly Escherian.

Another weekend, another free hour to improve Inkling, the 95% Gemini-generated Emacs client for Inkwell. In addition to fixing a couple of annoying bugs — and how great is it that every RSS feed is its own unique snowflake? — I’ve added a bookmark manager for micro.blog’s bookmarks, complete with tagging. Next up: adding drafts to Microbe.

A mere 50 pages in and I can already tell that Inventing the Renaissance will be a banger of a book. Three concepts in particular stood out for there relevance far outside that particular period in history:

• Legitimacy, why it is important to have it and how to obtain it. Marrying into a noble family, graduating from a well-known program, surviving a few years in big pharma/big tech, getting linked to by a major website, etc.
• Zombie ideas as wrong theories that lead to more research that leads to correct theories but then refuse to die — cruthes that outlive their usefulness. See also: zombie medicine.
• Conflicting projections, as in the Medicis playing to role of “merchant scum” in Florence, a city which tends to banish people with ambitions towards nobility, while at the same time playing up your high status to the outsiders who view symbols of nobility as a sign of legitimacy (see above). It is a tough game to play which is why the AI companies are failing at it so spectacularly (to investors and eneterprise clients: we will eliminate the need for XX% of the work force; to the plebs: let us build data centers, it will create jobs; to themselves: why do they hate us?)

No surprise that it has been nominated for a Best Related Work Hugo Award, and kudos to Palmer for compelling me to write the first “currently reading” post in almost two years (the last one was also for a book she wrote).

🕹️ Good write up in today’s FT about Esoteric Ebb, a fantasy RPG which seems to be heavily influenced by Planescape: Tornment, Disco Elysium and Terry Pratchet’s Discworld. Sign me up! Mentioned at the end is Type Help, a free-to-play text adventure that is quite unlike any work of interactive fiction I’ve seen before. Recommended.

• Subscription Cost Visualizer ⊕ ᔥSwiss Miss, a nifty online tool that is like DaisyDisk for your subscriptions. Wish I had it before the purge for a before and after.
• Joan Westenberg: Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decay. The only nit I have to pick with this marvelous essay is that Westenberg mentions Nate Silver, he of old 538, as “one of the more honest figures here” without mentioning his clear conflict of interest.
• David Cain on Raptitude: Count Your Blessings, but Count Carefully. A nice reframing of the human condition, which I will add to my list of mental models.
• Peco Gaskovski: Measuring out my life in coffee spoons. The me with and without coffee are indeed a different person, and anyone with whom I’ve crossed paths owes some gratitude to the Ottomans for bringing it to Europe.
• Daniel Franks: on Yi Yi, my favourite movie and why I think everyone must watch it. I am yet to see it, but it is on the list!

Tax Day was a good kick in the rear to clean up all the recurring payments that have accumulated over the years. Here are a few notable cancellations:

• Netflix, which I tend to picked on even as I commend its better offerings. Turd to diamond ratio is still too high, and with the most recent price increase it is not worth it any more.
• Paramount+, because there are better things to do in one’s life than watch Star Trek reruns.
• Disney+ would have been a cancellation as we rarely ever watch it. But for some reason we have been grandfathered into the Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ 4K plan for $80 per annum and at that price it is worth it to have Gravity Falls available at a moment’s notice.
• All iOS weather apps, because my weather-related needs just aren’t that sophisticated and the default app serves them fine, thank you very much.
• Hookmark, previously known as Hook, a MacOS productivity app that (1) pissed me off by brandishing the tag line “Buy Once, Own Forever” even as it kills you with notifications that the new version 3.2.1.3.2.5 is out and you need to pay $30 for an “Updates license” all while (2) I am trying to move away from MacOS anyway. Yes, technically this is not a subscription that needs canceling but the toughest attachments to part with are those that exist only in my mind (see also: Tinderbox, DEVONthink, OmniFocus, MailMate, etc.)
• Epsilon Theory, a more esoteric platform which never quite recaptured the time they first grabbed my attention.

So with all of that deadweight removed, I felt that I could splurge on a Digital+Print subscription to Nautilus, an even more lay audience-friendly version of Quanta Magazine. Both of those are, of course, wildflowers growing out of the compost pile that was Scientific American. Thus Nautilus joins the Financial Times as the only print editions we subscribe to, all other magazines that come in the mail being hoisted on us as members of various medical societies.

• Bayesian Workflow, a new book from Andrew Gelman et al, coming out in June. Here is Gelman’s announcement and here is the book’s web page.
• The Alba Madonna, ⊕ ᔥ Tyler Cowen a painting of Raphael’s at the National Gallery of Art, which you can examine in detail on their website.
• The Classical Station, ⊕ ᔥ William Parker a no-nonsense, no-tracking stream of human-selected music. Here is their daily playlist.
• just the fracking QR code, ⊕ ᔥ Jahir Fiquitiva on Mastodon a no-nonsense, no tracking website that will give you the QR image for any text, file or hex code you desire.
• Jellyfin, a home media server which resembles Plex before it was enshittified. Note that (1) I am yet to try it out and (2) the person whom I first saw mention it does not in fact endorse it.

Having switched to Linux for 90% of my computing, I realized Emacs could cover much of those 90%:

• mu4e for email
• org-mode for project management
• Denote for slipbox-styled notes I have followed the Zettelkasten blog since its early days but have somehow missed out that they were big proponents of Emacs. Here is a talk Christian Tietez of the Zettelkasten blog had at EmacsConf 2025, which is how I learned about Denote.
• A custom micro.blog client, Microbe, for blog post management
• A custom Inkwell client, Inkling, for reading RSS feeds

And for all my kvetching about how ugly Emacs can be, this was in fact a me problem and not an Emacs problem. It took 8 lines of code and downloading some decent fonts for things to look much better.

Microsoft’s Windows Office Copilot web apps cover almost everything else. Alas, not absolutely everything:

• Having used DEVONthink for document management I am reluctant to go back to the naked file system. Still, in the last few years I had been using DEVONthink’s advanced capabilities less and less to the point that its main purpose was as a security blanket.
• My data analysis journey went from R to Python (or rather iPython/Jupyter) to Mathematica. There are many reasons why Mathematica is no longer a good fit so now I have to decide how many steps back I should take — to Python or R.
• Podcast recording and editing is a tiny issue in the grand scheme — there is but a single podcast in Serbian that I am in care of — but I would rather not have to reinvent the workflow I have down pat in Logic Pro that gets me from raw mp3 to the final upload in 15 minutes or less.

Which is to say, expect a few more of these updates on the software side. Hardware will have to wait.