• Venkatesh Rao: On Cooling America Out. Rao is back and in rare form, expanding on a 1952 paper about conmen and their victims. In the process, he describes a leg of the American elephant not often discussed:

The US is something of a clueless striver culture of idealistic innocents who believe themselves to be worldly and cunning, based on a bewildering stack of ludicrous mythologies ranging from the personal-scale “American Dream” to the various eras of American Exceptionalism. This is true even of the macho idealism of the right.

It is also a culture of people who seem systematically disposed to the suspicion that they are being conned by someone in everything they do, and are primed to try and con others pre-emptively before they get conned. And do so while maintaining an image of their own righteousness. Trust, but verify, is the nice way of putting it. A more accurate way might be: I’m a good person, but everyone is out to get me, so I’d better try to get them first. I’m still a good person.

Because, of course, only the paranoid survive.

• Ian Betteridge: The worst of us. Betteridge starts with a note on the wonderfuly-named Claude Mythos but soon jumps over to my favorite short story. I won’t spoil the ending.
• Nick Maggiulli: The Upper Middle Class Trap. Maggiulli tries to explain some recent observations. His conclusion is similar to Rao’s: the con is nearing its end. Get out if you still can.
• Terry Godier: Body Language. What Godier is doing isn’t blogging. It’s performance art.

Goodbye, Feedly. Now that Inkwell has soft-launched OPML sync ⊕ If you are a Premium user of micro.blog, go to the Account page and click the “OPML Sync…” button in the Feed subscriptions section. It asks for the URL of the OPML file you would like to sync with, though from my experiments “Sync” is a bit of a misnomer as it will only add the RSS feeds it finds there that you don’t yet have on Inkwell but it doesn’t remove the ones that are on Inkwell but not in the syncing OPML. I can go back to FeedLand as my source of RSS feed subscription truth. This also means that my blogroll is due for a makeover. Would it not be much better if I could show the most recent posts for each recommended feed, FeedLand-style?

The second update is to Hugo, micro.blog’s static website generator of choice, which is now version 0.158, from 0.91. Hugo versioning is absolutely idiotic so you can’t tell, but this is a 60-version jump. The tradeoff for the noticeably quicker site generation — from around 2 minutes to <1 minute, important for someone who keeps finding typos in all of their posts — was time spent whack-a-mole-ing errors until I came to just a single WARNING which will hopefully not snowball into anything more serious.

The biggest errors, and the reason why initially the blog wouldn’t render at all, was that a bunch of functions were replaced by different, similarly sounding functions, made for reasons unknown. Petty stuff like .Site.Authors is now .Site.Params.authors, or .Page.Hugo is now hugo.Generator. Things that in the background may have been a life-and-death battle between warring Hugo factions (originalists versus those deathly afraid of technical debt? free spirits versus pedants?) but whose result is mere end-user annoyance. These were a simple Find and Replace away.

Second-order issues came from plugins that have not yet been updated. So in addition to Feedly I have also said my goodbyes to the Stats section of this blog, and to various rarely used functions — how often do people share this stuff on Facebook anyway, and does Facebook still have those web cards for each site?

The last is a warning that the term taxonomyterm has been deprecated and that, per Gemini, I should and I kid you not change taxonomyTerm to taxonomy and the old taxonomy to term. I thought I did this everywhere, but apparently not as I still get that warning each time I post something. But that I can live with.

A missed parenthesis obliterating all reference-style markdown links in this post along with other people’s attempts, good and bad, finally pushed me to add a proofreading step before hitting C-c C-c in Microbe. In the latest version, a C-c C-p will send the draft post to Gemini 2.5 Flash with this prompt: ⊕ The prompt itself was, of course, suggested by Gemini 3.1 Pro, as was all of the actual LISP code to implement proofreading.

You are a strict, technical copy-editor. Your ONLY job is to fix spelling mistakes, typographical errors, and invalid Markdown and Hugo shortcode syntax. You MUST NOT alter the author’s voice, style, phrasing, vocabulary, or structural choices. Output ONLY the corrected text. Do not add conversational filler, introductions, or explanations.

The main reason for the step were annoying shortcode mistakes that would lead to mangled posts, or even more often posts not even making it through Micro.blog’s build leading to minutes (minutes!) spent digging through error logs. But of course there were many, many more spelling mistakes. Last week’s Clara Barton post alone had a whopping 14!

⊕ So much red…

Whatever Gemini sends back, Emacs shows in split-screen view with errors in the old text marked in red and the new and improved version marked below in green. For each change, an a accepts and a d declines the suggestion. Easy!

Having said goodbye to Google years ago I can see the irony in picking Gemini to be my go-to LLM and at some point I will switch to an offline model, Doctorow-style. Until then, Gemini is it, thanks to the blandness of Google and its reliability (and it is saying something about the competition when the master of killing services for no good reason is reliable by comparisson).

I

Last year, I replaced my Apple Watch with a Casio F-91W, a marvel of engineering. Terry Godier has just posted an essay, ⊕ ᔥJohn Gruber beautifully designed, about the merits of that very model over any smart watch you can get. By the topic, message, look and feel of the article I should love it. Instead, I get a visceral reaction when I come across a passage like this:

And that absence, the peace of a thing that does what it does and then shuts up, feels like the most luxurious thing I own.

Not because it’s retro. Not because it’s minimal.

Because it’s done.

And also these two passages, back to back:

Most of your screen time isn’t leisure. It isn’t addiction. It isn’t even a choice.

It’s maintenance.

Your phone is not a slot machine.

It’s a to-do list that writes itself.

Godier recently came out with Current, an RSS reader for iOS whose product pages resembles the Casio essay in both language and design. Not surprising — the author is the same — but it did have a certain smell to it, a cadence of nots and buts that made me think when I first read that it was written by generative AI first, edited by a human second. The sheer length of the copy, leisurely meandering around the topic like the Colorado river’s double oxbow, made me think this was not the work of a software developer who would probably rather spend time polishing their app than designing scrollable eye candy.

But hey, Godier makes software first, writes second. If generative LLMs help them make better software more quickly, and then they use the same tool for something that is not their primary occupation, then who am I to judge?

II

Two days ago, I linked to “Lobster Boil”, an essay from Om Malik about the rise of OpenClaw. This is a typical passage:

AI can be personal. Not a service you subscribe to. Not a platform you visit. A thing that runs on your machine, serves your intentions, uses the model you choose, and works through the apps you already live in

And here is a passage from Malik’s “Neo Symbolic Capitalism”:

Which is why Twitter, now X, feels unbeatable despite everything. It is not because the product is superior. It is because the people with the most power and the most to gain have turned it into a gaming platform for symbolic capital. They are not users. They are players. And the game is very, very good to them.

A sentiment I can get behind! But the style still makes my skin crawl. There are 13 “nots” and 4 “buts” in Malik’s essay. His 2024 “Silicon Valley’s Empathy Vacuum” has not a single “not”, and a single lonely “but”.

Om Malik used to write for a living.

III

This morning I was browsing my RSS feeds — via Inkling for Inkwell, of course — when I saw Doug Belshaw’s post about his 7-step approach for authentic AI-assisted blogging. Belshaw also writes the wonderful Thought Shrapnel blog, quoted here many times, so I was keen to learn more. I was sad to see that, among the seven steps, the one that generated the first draft of the post was relegated to AI. There is a human rewrite then, followed by evaluation of the final text by GPTzero.me to see how much humanity that rewrite managed to instill.

I mean, what are we even doing here?

The byline for Belshaw’s articles should be “Perplexity”, who should then thank Doug for giving them the idea, reading the first draft of the article, and helping them with revisions. Belshaw mentions in his 7-step guide that Cory Doctorow was panned when he shared his own approach to LLM assistance in writing. Doctorow has AI proof-read his already written articles. This approach I can understand and will indeed start implementing one of these days: there have been one too many instances of extra parenthesis screwing up my Markdown, not to mention run-on sentences, unintentional non sequiturs and the like.

IV

I have written quite a few first drafts of scientific articles, and have revised countless more. The first draft is harder by far, but is also the one that makes the biggest mark. It sets the tone and, unless you have a particularly sadistic co-author who has the actual article already written and ready to use as redline all over your first attempt, will make the most of the final product.

Everything Godier, Malik and Belshaw write can and will be used to teach other LLMs about how to write. The first-draft approach to LLM assistance is creating the AI ouroboros. I’d rather not be around to see it fully manifest.

John Gruber had to write an AppleScript to ‘Save MarsEdit Document to Text File’. With Microbe, my 99% Gemini-generated first attempt to create a Micro.blog client in Emacs, this function came built in without my having to specify it. ⊕ Now, I am yet to add an actual Draft status to the Microbe posts. But since I post these as soon as I write them without much time left to simmer, for better or worse, this has not been a priority. Since the interface for composing posts is just another Emacs buffer you can save it as a text file as you would any other buffer: with a C-x C-s. Which is to say, Ctrl-x, then Ctrl-s. Emacs’ propensity towards shortcuts extends to the text descriptions of the shortcuts themselves.

The functionality comes for free, but let’s face it Emacs is not the prettiest thing to look at right out of the box, and to my knowledge there is no way to beautify that toolbar. I had a feeling it was the antithesis to Gruber’s design sense, and that was indeed the case as far back as 2002 when he described it as being “at opposing end of the spectrum” from his favorite text editor, BBEdit. Of course, some implementations are worse than others. There was a positive mention, albeit indirectly, when Gruber quoted from an interview with Donald Knuth. In it, Knuth mentioned that:

I have special Emacs modes to help me classify all the tens of thousands of papers and notes in my files, and special Emacs keyboard shortcuts that make bookwriting a little bit like playing an organ.

This is the power of Emacs: to make you forget about its (lack of) interface because it is the Hole Hawg of text, all the more powerful now that generative AI can create custom modes in a blink. You will look at it in awe even as it leaves you dangling from a ladder.

• 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?