Dictated the first draft of this from an Index 01. Integration with Micro.blog isn’t there yet but at some point I might be “writing” blog posts with only my left index finger.

Without having seen this week’s Apple event, I can feel it in my bones that the future of pocket devices is something small that can on demand turn into something big. No, I’m not preordering — for reasons — but surely the matte screen and other crease-hiding trickery will at some point trickle down to a sub-$1,000 inflation-adjusted level.

I can wait.

Alex Tabarrok writes that it doesn’t matter if the workers’ share of GDP shrinks because of AI. As long as the pie is bigger — and our AI oligarchs say it can be as much as 10% bigger each year! — the average worker will have a bigger share in absolute terms if not in relative.

Hogwash. The one who has the bigger slice has the power to lord over the ones with smaller slices so the relative size does in fact matter. Never mind that our sense of wellbeing is itself ties to how we perceive ourselves in the overall community. What Tabarrok proposes is voluntary serfdom. I think not.

• Dan Luu: Ed Zitron’s AI prediction track record. Not great. I have linked to Zitron a few times, to articles that were short enough for me to actually read and understand. Most of them were just too long and/or too angry. Fitting that a critique of Zitron’s writing is just as long, though much more even-keel.
• Lilly Lynch: Sympathy for the Devil? Lindsay Clancy, Mercy and Maternal Filicide in History. The less I know about this case the better, but this was some good context.
• Ernie Smith: Wanted: Some Cheap Computing. Issue No. 1 of Smith’s mini-PC newsletter. I am in the market for both a heavy-duty primary machine and some satellite servers, and thanks to the ramapocalypse the latter — and therefore this newsletter — is much more appealing.
• Derek Sivers: Bangalore India hospital flow. Today I learned Sivers was a fan of “executive health checks”. Yikes! As I wrote in a comment to the article:

The human body is not a car. We don’t know how most of it works. There are a handful of labs you should start getting once you hit 40 (or earlier depending on family history), and a few cancer screenings we know work. Anything else is a needless waste of money at best, and a recipe for an iatrogenic disaster if an incidental finding from a whole-body MRI leads to a wild goose chase, biopsies, surgeries, etc. Not to mention the false sense of security these things can give.

Calling it now: “quietly” is Word of the Year 2026.

What AI sired, mindless zeitgeist reverberators now rear.

Haven’t mentioned it in a while, but my move away from Apple continues.

Pixel 10a purchased, GrapheneOS installed.

Alea iacta est.

Apple rejected an astronomy app from the iOS App Store because “it was astrology”. When the author appealed, Apple doubled down because “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.” Ridiculous, right?

Well. The author in question is Terry Godier, and while I understand that he has gained quite the following in recent months, I am not a fan. He is unabashedly pro undisclosed AI writing, having conjured — “written” would be inappropriate in this context — a whole essay on large language models being a whole new communication technology. Trigger warning for those sensitive to LLM-ese.

The app, “Dark Hours”, was supposed to be an iOS-native version of this website. It has some truly useful information on the quality of the night sky for stargazing at any given location. It also has the tells of AI generation: too wordy — or overly verbose, if you prefer LLM talk — in some places, too technical in others. Many small digits scattered around the screen. It even manages to fit a this-not-that in what should be a technical explanation.

I have nothing against using LLMs as a coding aide. Dave Weiner sings Claude praises daily in his blog, while being realistic about its limits. Half of the ATP Podcast is an advertisement both paid and unpaid for OpenAI and Anthropic. The creator of Pedometer++, Widgetsmith and many other apps, “Underscore” David Smith, had a good post on his use cases. If you look at their products you could never tell that they were “made by” AI, because they weren’t. If any of them has ever made a fully “vibe-coded” app, they have yet to publish it under their name.

But then if you do fully vibe-code an app, and I am not a programmer so professionals please chime in, can you and do you vet every single line of code? “Live tarot reading” is a weird mistake for a human reviewing an app to make, unless there is a live tarot reading advertisement (or, why not, full functionality) somehow baked into the thousands of lines of code. Stranger things have happened than an app behaving differently depending on the IP address, though they usually try to hide something from the App Store reviewers, not show it to them.

All this to say, the story smells and I’d withhold judgement until we have more information. Unless, of course, it was Apple using automated LLM-based review even in the appeal process, in which case: a plague on all their houses.

I am shocked — shocked! — to find a zoomer “AI investor” caught swimming naked at the first turn of the tide:

Aschenbrenner, who had no previous trading experience before starting the fund, worked for the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire before it collapsed in late 2022. He later joined OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team before being fired over an alleged leak.

With such an illustrious pedigree, how could things have possibly gotten so wrong so quickly?

And in the unlikely case you were still wondering if there was an AI bubble, even FT called it.

• Venkatesh Rao: Cognitive Farmsteading. From the man who came up with premium mediocre (2017), the cozyweb (2019), and the Internet of beefs (2020) here is another tone-setting phrase. He spent the better part of this decade working on sloptraptions (guess who his co-author is there) so I lost interest, but this article is fully Rao in every sense, even if his preferences in AI use — discussed in the article — are far, far removed from my own.
• Cory Doctorow: Discernment. Doctorow’s preferences, on the other hand, match mine to a T, spell checking and all (would a regular spellchecker note the missing greater-than sign in my Hugo notation?) What I don’t yet have is my very own on-device chatbot — have you seen the RAM prices these days? — but that is coming, with or without the bubble bursting.
• Debbie Millman: If You’re Over 40, You’re Ready to Use A.I. The thesis is in the title, and it is downright stupid. Persons over a certain age — 65? 75? I don’t know for sure and there are individual differences but it is in that ballpark — have no chatbot immunity or capacity for discernment (see above) and from my experience account for 95% of slop being unintentionally shared around the Internet.
• Lila Shroff for The Atlantic: America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek. Headed towards or pushed?

In Silicon Valley, engineers assign their agents tasks to complete overnight, and then check the results even before their morning coffee. Some are staying up late: “The opportunity cost of going to sleep is too high,” the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said on The Joe Rogan Experience last month. “If you go to sleep, you won’t be with your 20 AI coding agents.”

This Andreessen guy sounds like a grade-A asshole.

As described here:

1. Use browsers not apps.
2. Use Firefox or, if you are concerned about their recent turn, at least a Mozilla and not Chromium-based browser.
3. Hit ctrl-alt-r for Reader mode (Cmd-alt-R on MacOS). ⊕ [Note: Per Doctorow: Firefox tries to guess whether a given page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You can force Firefox to always allow you to try Reader Mode by going to “about:config” in your location bar, then searching for “reader.parse-on-load.force-enabled” and toggling it to “true”. If you switch to Reader Mode and the page breaks, you can switch back by hitting ctrl-alt-r again. ] Sometimes, reloading the page while in reader mode works.
4. If reader mode doesn’t work, try the Kill Sticky bookmarklet. That’s the second line of defence.
5. However, Kill Sticky requires you to hit the bookmarklet every time you are on the same web page. For a more permanent solution, try Adblock plus. With that extension on, right-clicking will show a “Block Element…” option to the context menu.
6. If all of that fails, try the Remove Paywall website or browser extension.

Looks exhausting, no? We have come to the Red Queen’s Race stage of the Internet. And as a reminder, this is a dickover.