Bret Terpstra’s Marked 3 Beta is out. As powerful as BBEdit is, I still have to deal with many .docx documents without any reliable way to convert heavily tracked and commented versions to markdown and back. After a quick test, Marked 3 seems to fit the bill. I will happily be a paying customer as soon as Terpstra gives me the opportunity, so here is to a successful launch!

• V.H. Belvadi: Working with the end in sight. ⊕ ᔥPhil Bowell, who also noted the beautiful site design. Matches my own experience with Zettelkasten/Slip-box systems, in that none of the very productive people in academia I know actually use anything close to them. Belvadi is sticking to markdown files edited in BBEdit; I am partial to DEVONThink and TinderBox although both of them can also punt text files to BBEdit, which is on my list of should-learn apps.
• Andrej Karpathy: Chemical hygiene. This list of sensible advice for managing our own environment appeared in my RSS reader as part of the Bear blog discovery feed, with small-a “andrej” listed as the author. Since I found myself nodding along to most of it The risk of chemical exposure while handling paper receipts is overblown unless you work at a cash register, in which case you really should wear gloves. I clicked through to check out this andrej’s other work and lo, it was Andrej Karpathy. Unsurprisingly, his 2025 LLM Year in Review was also quite good.
• Brooklyn Gibbs: how to use the internet again: a curriculum. ⊕ ᔥThought Shrapnel, with a much better re-title. Online literacy for adults and children alike. Note in particular that there exist things outside the web: see Project Gemini for an example of a cozy part of the Internet that is very much distinct from the World Wide Web.
• Matthew Haughey: Recent camping and travel discoveries. We will have a fourth-grader in the household next year which means a National Parks pass for the whole family, so this may come in useful!

In today’s episode of Dithering Gruber and Thompson are mystified that Shadowrocket was the second most downloaded paid app in the US App Store, because why would so many Americans want to hide without VPN? The answer, of course, is that those “US” App Store customers are actually Chinese.

• Jacob Savage: The Lost Generation

A story of white male millennials being blocked from career advancement because of DEI. The fields he highlights are scripted television shows, news magazines and academia which aren’t exactly thriving now but per Savage did back when these policies were being implemented (early to mid-2010s). The rise of the “manosphere” and crypto brotherhood was therefore revenge of the jilted, which sounds plausible. One does not become an NFT peddler because they want to but because they couldn’t fulfill their life-long dream of being a tenured Women’s Studies professor.

Note that only early-career positions seem to have been affected, where people with no skill and/or time to choose among many qualified candidates decided to simultaneously switch from one discriminatory heuristic to another. So maybe not everyone should have done it at the same time (a good policy to follow for any change)? Would a method for unbiased selection of early job candidates have to involve an AI? And what are the demographic of OpenAI and Meta’s leadership again?

• Derek Lowe: Where Are They Now: Verge Genomics

A Y Combinator company tries to use machine learning to discover new drugs. No, they didn’t figure it out and are now pivoting to selling pickaxes instead of digging for gold themselves. Godspeed.

• Hiya Jain: A Case Study In Scientific Coordination

Retelling of the story of penicillin’s discovery and mass manufacturing, which is much more complex than the typical serendipity-is-important (or, sometimes, luck-favors-the-prepared-mind) tale that begins and ends with Alexander Fleming’s accidentally contaminating a bacterial culture with mold. This is not to disparage the more popular variant: a big part of my childhood was soaking up wild tales of invention via Discoveries Unlimited which originally came out in the year of my birth but was dubbed to Serbian and played on repeat on state TV in the early 1990s. Of course, my own children now have something infinitely more majestic than the “Video Encyclopedia” from that show… and use it to play Roblox.

• Azhdarchid: Thematic expression in game design, or: Why Dune (1992) rules

This also took me back! And not only because of Dune, which I played several times through the end and liked much more than the sequel, one of the first real-time strategy games. No, this article is also about It came from the desert and Sid Meier’s Pirates! and many other games that used short-but-sweet bursts of different mechanics to tell a coherent story, which is qualitatively different from a collection of mini-games sold to highlight the multi-functionality of Nintendo’s new controller. I hope an indie game studio somewhere is working on bringing them back.

📸 Day 2 of micro.blog’s Winter Wonder Photo Challenge and the word of the day is cozy.

So, here are some cozy web stickers that will make any office cubicle (or — shudders — an open office) hospitable.

My font fiddling continues. Google fonts as recommended by ChatGPT are out, Charter, Cooper Hewitt and Source Code Pro as recommended by Matthew Butterick in his delightful Practical Typography are in. Next up, the color scheme.

📚 Finished reading: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, which is a continuation of his blog posts and essays on the word he coined. I was worried that this would be a pointless pad-job, like what David Graber did for his similarly scatological Bullshit Jobs. But no, the topic is deep and Doctorow’s book explores those depths with competency and good humor.

What I most appreciate is that the solutions aren’t of the end-user “use paper straws” type. The point is not to boycott Amazon, leave all social media, move to a Kaczynski-style cottage; rather it is to put pressure on local, state and federal lawmakers to do their jobs and prevent the country’s slide to full-on technofeudalism. This is another delightful term, popularized by Yanis Varoufakis who himself has direct experience working for a feudal lord, Valve. Yes, there is a book and yes, I it is now on the ever-growing pile. Although, I still plan on canceling our household’s Prime subscription and redirecting the money to EFF.

Note that Doctorow describes himself as leftist and calls people “comrade”, a term at which I tend to recoil. He also sings praises to the EU legislature, of which I am profoundly sceptical. Still. We can agree that Big Tech is too big and that their bosses are too cozy with the government, and that between European Union’s incompetence and the American increasingly corporatized state only one has a straight path to totalitarianism, the final destination of end-stage enshittification.

• Joe Wilkins: McDonald’s Pulls Down AI-Generated Holiday Ad After Deluge of Mockery. The offensive ad is still available for viewing, and I am horrified to report that it is in fact on par with non-AI holiday marketing shlock. Every profession that feels collectively threatened by LLMs has spent decades undermining itself and is now reaping what it sowed, and yes I include many medical specialties here.
• Sam Kriss for the NYT: Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? A brilliant essay with illustrations that would make me blow a fuse if I were to see them out in the wild. Kriss has a blog to which I am now subscribed and also seems to post on this new social network for writers called… Substack? And Curtis Yarvin plus the rationalist buffoons hate him? Worth following!
• Christopher Butler: The Last Invention. “The real threat of AI as ‘the last invention’ isn’t that it will actually end human innovation and put us all out to pasture in a withering culture of leisure, but that we’ll believe it will. That we’ll internalize the narrative of our own obsolescence and stop trying. That we’ll mistake the tool for the maker and forget that the heart that yearns past the boundary is what drives everything forward.”
• Andrew Sharp: Netflix and the Flattening of Everything. I am not a fan of Netflix. In fact, I dread the moment when they gobble up the last thing, idea or person standing on their path to entertainment singularity. And yet I stay subscribed.
• Taylor Jessen on Mastodon: Candidate for Post of the Year. The post in question is a screenshot from Bluesky which perfectly demonstrates end-stage enshittifaction of what used to be the capital-I Internet, but that is beside the point which is in fact funny and true.

• Vincent Rajkumar on X: I’ve been on this platform for 16 years. Here are some tips on how to be productive, and gain influence and credibility on X. Great advice for those attending the 2015 ASH Annual Meeting, but I am not so sure about their utility a decade later. Where is the hematology dark forest?
• Edward Zitron: The Era Of The Business Idiot. The more sociopathic of Taleb’s IYIs become executives; hilarity ensues.
• Cory Doctorow: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI. An introduction to Doctorow’s new book, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Astute as ever.
• Chris Arnade: [Why are Americans Unhappy]. Arnade dismantles the $140,000 poverty line idiocy with a side jab at the abundance movement by repeating the insight he has each time he visits a seemingly poorer but more communal part of Europe:

So yes, Americans are materially wealthy and unfulfilled, and the primary problem is cultural—we’ve sacrificed community and meaning to emphasize an archetype built on acquiring as much stuff as possible, but then we have made that unnecessarily hard to do. When you give your citizens a cultural script, built on the material, that promises hard work will lead to success, and then your policy design ensures it doesn’t, people will end up both economically frustrated, as well as spiritually empty, sitting in their living room streaming the latest movie wondering what exactly is the point of life. Or, they will feel they have failed at the material, while also having little else to give them meaning.

• Lily Lynch: How the US Stunted Europe. Short and to the point, no notes. Sufficient to make me re-subscribe to Lynch’s newsletter. She links to her review of Sanna Marin’s biography, which is also no-notes wonderful.
• Chris Person for Aftermath: Horses is Tame. I have never heard of the game Horses before or the controversy surrounding it, so I must assume that Valve, Epic and others who banned it for not sure what exactly have never heard of the Streisand effect. Well done, folks.
• Jim Olds: How Will You Know You’ve Succeeded?. I have panned this career research administrator’s first blog post, but this one was in fact enlightening. You have to keep the funders happy, even if they are an amorphous blob called “the American taxpayer”.
• Dr. Christine Corbett Moran: Scaling Career and Family: Systems Thinking, Public School, Home Enrichment. Advice on raising kids from a couple of scientists/engineers turned entrepreneurs. Useful, if a bit on the spectrum, and I even more thankful we had extensive family support when raising our kids, particularly early on.
• Nick Maggiulli: There is No Substitute for Thinking. What are students who use ChatGPT thinking, if they are thinking at all? Will they be writing texts like the ones above or post AI slop in their middle age? Time will tell.