• 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.

I am writing this from an Apple Vision Pro, VisionOS 26 Beta 8, no additional hardware, just pecking away at the virtual keyboard. A few thoughts:

• I am convinced that no person younger than 40 was involved in the decision-making during its development.
• The basis for this is that the pass-through looks better each time I use it, not because the camera, screens or software have improved but because I am developing presbyiopia (near-sightedness of old age), and rapidly.
• This is also why I suspect there are still no good VR-first games or even a proper controller.
• Why can’t I stream a PS5 game onto a huge screen? I thought Apple and Sony were friendy.
• The carrying case is too bulky for short work trips, which would have been my primary use.
• They had 18 months to work on the virtual typing experience and it is still a nightmare by default.
• For a tolerable experience I suggest enlarging it to maximum size, posiyioning it so that you can use both index fingers with elbows supported, then imagine you are using an old typewritter with sticky keys that are prone to jamming.
• Still, no regrets.

• Bart’s Watch Stories on YouTube: How Casio Made the Most Sold Watch Ever. It is about Casio F-91W, my default watch, and I can attest to its — excuse the pun — timelessness.
• @StatisticUrban on X: What states do Americans most approve of? DC is the lowest at +1 net approval.
• Ruxandra Teslo: Your newborn is not Hepatitis B vaccinated because of wokeness. See also her exchange on X with Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, aka Mr Head-Up-Ass who loves the sound of his one voice even as he recommends disastrous remedies for obvious problems.
• Marioun Fourcade and Kieran Healy: Authenticate thyself. The subheading is “The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age”. It is more highfalutin than what I usually read — “The combination of epistemological self-centredness and hyperconnectivity makes people susceptible to diffuse forms of ‘supersense’-making (to borrow a term from Hannah Arendt).”, reads one sentence — but the essay does some important sense-making of its own:

As the deployment of digital technologies continues to generate ever-more stratospheric concentrations of wealth, the masses sink deeper into the void left by the evisceration of social solidarity and the rise of automation. The often-missed point about sovereign individuals is that not everyone gets to be one. But everyone should aspire to be one, and in the meantime follow one, as they walk down the road to selfdom.

Worth reading for that last sentence alone.

This week was a good one for learning about new apps:

• Zen browser puts an Arc skin over a Firefox core. It has already become my default browser. (ᔥBen Werdmuller)
• Macrowave enables AV streaming to anyone. I do plan on using it to stream but for now I am just marveling at the WinAmp esthetics. (ᔥGus Mueller)
• Inksightful digitizes paper notes. I am on the waitlist for the beta. (ᔥThe Iconfactory)

On the topic of apps, here are some fairly new ones (i.e. I have been using them for less than 5 years) that are passing the test of time, with honors:

• Tot, which is still my default for digital note-taking on the both the Mac and on iOS
• Flighty, which is invaluable for those flying in the US. Alas, it is not as useful, I have been finding out this summer, for travel in Europe. Those Europeans are not very good at updating their systems.
• The Cardhop/Fantastical combo, without which I could not imagine juggling between four different contact lists and a half-dozen calendars.
• MarsEdit, which I missed out on listing initially even as I was using it to write this very post. It is that essential that I consider it a part of the OS at this point.

And the apps that make me stick to the Mac even though I entertain from time to time the possibility of switching over to Linux:

• MailMate (since 2013)
• DEVONthink (since 2015)
• OmniFocus (since 2016)
• Tinderbox (since 2017)
• Audio Hijack and Sound Source (since 2020)

As much as I like the Mac hardware and the sleek aluminum esthetics, it is the software listed above that keeps me in the ecosystem. None of it is made by Apple.

The most recent issue of the FT Weekend Magazine is about games of all kinds, but the highlight is a massive article about the tragedy of Disco Elysium. It is depressing throughout, with a glimmer of hope buried near the end:

Kurvitz is making his next game at a new studio, Red Info, with Aleksander Rostov, Helen Hindpere and Chris Avellone, lead writer of the 1999 video game Planescape: Torment, a huge influence on Disco. “[Kurvitz] felt that Disco was the project in his head, and once he was cut off from the franchise, he was worried he didn’t have any other ideas in him,” Avellone told me. “I felt that was bullshit . . . Robert’s too creative to simply ‘not’ create something or rely on a single world idea in his head.”

Creators of Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium working together on a new game? Be still, my heart.