Last month I linked to two things that are now worth following up on:

• John Nerst’s book “Competitive Sensemaking” is out. The only non-Amazon option is an ebook, so I will leave this one for the Daylight tablet.
• Steven Johnson’s NotebookLM project “Planet Of The Barbarians” is also live, accompanying the newsletter series of the same name. Even more interesting to me are [the notebook][3b] and [newsletter post][3c] titled “The Architecture of Ideas”, referencing Johnson’s work on tools and workflows for writing. Warning: both are full of rabbit holes.

And on the abandoning Apple front:

• Matt Gemmell has concerns about Apple much better baked than my own. He also has thoughts on detaching but seems less willing to give up on the ecosystem than I am. (ᔥJohn Brady)
• My own toe in the Apple-less pool is giving up on the essential Mac-only apps. OmniFocus was the first on the chopping block, replaced by Emacs org-mode, though instead of going through now pretty dated tutorials behind that link I just asked Google Gemini how best to convert Kurosh Dini’s Creating Flow with OmniFocus into Org. And it worked! The idea is be to keep replacing apps with open-source equivalents until making the switch becomes easy. It will probably take years but you have to start somewhere.

• Technology Connections on YouTube: You are being misled about renewable energy technology.
• Silje Grytli Tveten: Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed
• Das Surma: Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering
• Christopher Schwarz: Free Now & Forever: ‘Campaign Furniture’
• Doug Belshaw: The strange magic of the third week

OK, these two are included more for saliency than positivity, but they are also good!

• Michael Lopp: I Hate Fish. Because I am in the middle of a gtd identity crisis
• Akash Bhat: Curate or die. Which is about this very post, and those like it.

Update: Adam Mastroianni’s latest post fits here like a glove.

• Benj Edwards for Ars Technica: New OpenAI tool renews fears that “AI slop” will overwhelm scientific research. The writing has been on the wall for at least a year, but the capitulation of the academic publishing complex is shockingly fast even taking into account its rotten core.
• Tyler Kingkade for NBC News: To avoid accusations of AI cheating, college students are turning to AI. The article is even worse than the headline: professors and teaching assistants are the ones turning to AI to tell them whether a student used AI in their work, and will not accept any evidence to the contrary. To repent, you need to take a class on writing with integrity and write an apology. Something tells me the younger generations will not be kind to LLMs.
• Cal Newport: The Dangers of “Vibe Reporting” About AI. Newport flags vague reporting which attempts to associate AI adoption with productivity gains that lead to job loss. In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow uncovers this maneuver for what it is: a ball under cup scam that relies on our not paying attention.
• Simon Willison: Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now. It is interesting in the same way reading about major pileups is interesting. And maybe we can even learn something from them! But I’d rather they didn’t exist because exposure to the phrases in AI-generated text raises my blood pressure.
• Rohit Krishnan: Epicycles All The Way Down. I became wary of all long texts on Substack, X LinkedIn and the like, but I trust this one about the way LLMs may or may not reason to be largely written by a human and the sections that aren’t are explicitly called out.
• Andrew J. Cowan for ASH Clinical News: Imagining the Ideal AI Partnership in Hematology. Good to see a fellow hematologist explicitly call out Doctorow’s reverse centaurs as something to be avoided at any cost. And yes, I have added the relevant book to the pile.
• On the off chance you understand Serbian, this week’s episode of Priključenija also fits the theme.

Today I learned that I paid $200 for audio editing software I can only use while online, which is tough to do when 37,000 feet up in the air. I don’t think this was an issue prior to the latest round of enshittification.

Apple: Think Shitty.

An update on my recent Internet browser use:

• Zen
• Orion
• Vivaldi

Speed wins.

• Lily Lynch for The Ideas Letter: Cold War Fixations.

Book reviews make for great essays, particularly when the reviewer vehemently disagrees with the author’s main premise. The author here is Michael McFaul, a 1990s style liberal democrat who, much like his neoliberal counterparts can’t see that his project failed and therefore cannot even conceive of taking responsibility for that failure. Lynch takes him to task.

• Andrej Karpathy on X: A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.

Where the reliably sensible Karpathy provides an update on how he uses LLMs for programming and, well ⊕ ᔥTyler Cowen:

Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We’re also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements.

Of course, I would have named it slopocalypse instead of slopacolypse but, you know, potato potatoe.

• Bogdan-Mihai Mosteanu: From Microsoft to Microslop to Linux: Why I Made the Switch.

Both Windows and and MacOS have become sufficiently sloppy that people are looking for an exit. This will be the decade of Linux, and it already started with the Steam Deck about which I haven’t written anything here but have discussed briefly in a podcast (Serbian only).

• Bryan Vartabedian: Three Adaptive Stances of Doctors.

Scenarios on how physicians may respond to recent developments, with a Focus, Fight, or Build phenotype. At a glance it may look like the Build phenotype may be the “correct” one, but of course Vartabedian correctly points out that these people may soon enough become bullshit artists themselves. These are my words, not his. Dr Vartabedian was much more measured:

The problem I find is that a lot of builders aren’t in the trenches for long. They move into startups or administrative positions. And as they evolve, their view of medicine becomes fixed. And when you’re not struggling with the realities of an inbox, you begin to solve for a world that doesn’t exist.

This is something I also noticed, many years ago.

• @AutismCapital on X: Severus Snape - ALWAYS (LIVE at Hogwarts) 🔥🔥🔥

An LLM-generated music video for millennials ⊕ ᔥKevin Kelly which is getting a lot of attention because of course the quick cuts and incoherence of Sora and others are perfect for the medium. This is why people thinking that MTV shut down when it actually didn’t was so salient: its former viewers are being made to think that everyone will soon enough be spinning their own music videos set to their own (kind of) music.

There is a big winter storm threatening most of the continental US, and as any pair of overworked parents with an infant would do, my wife and I waited until a few days before snow piled on DC to get our other kids some new cold-weather boots.

We decided to shop in person rather than on Amazon because: 1) their feet are growing so fast that we have no idea what size boot they would be wearing for a particular model and 2) we had no time to try on a pair and return if the fit was bad, because the snow is coming in, like, less than 24 hours. My wife, having kept some contact with brick-and-mortar stores, suggested we went to the closest large shoes-only stores despite there being a Macy’s, a Nordstrom and a few other general department stores within walking distance from us, because apparently those were’t what they used to be. Okie dokie.

And so we took the green line to DC USA, a “multilevel enclosed urban shopping center anchored by big box stores”, most of which had closed since the mall’s heyday but we both remembered there being a DSW just around the corner and how could it have possibly gone out of business when its nearby competitor went bust shortly after we moved to DC? I think you can see where this is going: DSW too closed its DC locations for good early last year so we “kissed the door” as they say.

But there was a Target in the same building, and a Marshalls, and even something that used to be called “Burlington Coat Factory”. Surely between the three we would find a decent selection of children’s winter boots in the middle of January. Not a chance, said my wife who is wise and knowledgable in the ways of shopping, I write this without wanting to promote any stereotypes because we both in fact hate shopping, but it is all a matter of degrees and she hates it slightly less than I do. and I didn’t trust her but I should have because I did go into the Target remembering it as the Target of my youth — well, late 20s — when I had just come to America and its shelves along with those of Wallmart seemed to stretch into infinity.

My friends, the kids shoe shelf of this particular Target did not stretch into infinity. It barely stretched six feet. It had no more than three sizes of each model and no more than two models of each shoe type. Marshalls was even worse. Under the wise direction of our master shopper we didn’t even walk into the Burlington.

Which is to say, before online services began enshittifying, they had already spurred self-enshittification of the offline world. ⊕ Cory Doctorow may have intended enshittification to signify the four-stage worsening of online services under the squeeze of financialization, but Doctorow himself in the book and elsewhere welcomed the broader use of the term which is what I’m doing here and if you want to be pedantic call if “self-shittification” instead. There is an economy/sociology/other “soft” science paper there somewhere in describing the stages of offline enshittification. Put it together with online and you get a PhD in enshittology. Big department stores have been hollowed out, along with big book stores, big electronics, big toys, big airlines, and anything else big that depended on volume and not personal relationships and brands. Like all bad things, this happened slowly then suddenly: trying to outcompete the cloud businesses, they themselves raised a toe up to the cloud. ⊕ Note how the de-enshittifcation of big box stores involves a more personal approach. Those who can pivot to it will survive. But being a cloud platform is like pregnancy — you either are or are not — and they were clearly not.

Effects of the cloud on everyday life are particularly salient now that I’ve read Technofeudalism Though I maintain that “cloudism” is the better term and will use it instead. so this may be overstating the matter, but the broadest correct use of “enshittification” could be to describe the negative effects of cloud platforms becoming the dominant form of ownership, the thing that people need to have in order to become the movers and shakers of other people’s lives. For most of human history “the thing” was land. For the last few hundred years it was manufacturing capital. And now it’s this.

Each time, it made sense to sacrifice some of the base layer to build up and up. Yes, food was still important but even more important was the capital, so raze those fields of wheat and corn to erect factories. The famine will be worth it in the long run, for the survivors.

This is one big way in which cloud platforms have ruined meatspace. ⊕ Digishittification!Another one is the digitization of what should be simple tasks: from AV equipment at a university to digital homes. This is different from what happened to big box stores as it is not a self-inflicted response to cloudism but rather the effect of cloudists trying to impose themselves further onto meatspace and expand their domain to an ever-increasing number of objects and interactions. Heated seats as the horse armour of our new age, though even Bethesda didn’t have the gall to ask for recurring payments.

The third and personally most irksome form is the enshittification of our inner lives. ⊕ Lifeshittification! I have spent the last hour recounting our family’s voes of shoe shopping instead of cooking brisket. My conversations increasingly revolve about bad things that are happening, the reasons why they are happening, and the ways to prevent them from happening. More often than note this means: Teams is junk; Microsoft is a junk company; try to get Microsoft out of your life even if it means changing your kids' schools. Attention is now the commodity that land and capital used to be, and the cloud platforms have most of my attention. So is there even a way to win this fight?

Two years ago this week, as the implications of widespread LLM use began to crystalize, my (Serbian) podcast co-host and I discussed how ChatGPT would change medicine. It was apparent even back then that we were looking at an onslaught of bullshit — since then rebranded as “slop” — that would inundate platforms of the written word from medical journals to progress notes. Sadly, that ended up being the case sooner than I remember thinking.

What I did not expect was for the already odious video calls to become even worse. Friends, co-workers, business partners potential and current: we can tell when you have a chat window open during the call. The reflection in your eyeglasses changes at the rhythm of our conversation. Your mouth stands half-open, ready to parrot the non sequitur comment that your LLM spat out. You cannot provide context or clarify your question beyond reading it more slowly and spelling out the acronyms.

Job interviewer, beware. If you hire people based on calls only you may be shocked when you meet your new employee in person. If there is absolutely no chance for a real-life meeting before hand, at least make the call video. And be ready to bring a shovel.

Of course, this is a people issue not a technology issue. I wonder, however, if at the margin the availability of LLMs is making people worse. That those who would have otherwise made some cognitive effort now rely too much on this crutch. You can make the same argument about the written word ⊕ On the note of reading and writing, today’s Experimental History newsletter dealt with the topic. I completely agree with Mastroianni’s conclusion and look forward to adding his book to the pile. and how writing caused the decay in our collective memorization capabilities, just as Socrates foretold. Clearly, that particular tradeoff was on net a good one to make. Will we be able to say the same thing about the one humanity is making now?

Last year I was quite enthusiastic about Waymo, Google’s self-driving cars that have been on their way to DC for quite a while now with no go-live date in sight. Well just this week I was in San Francisco again and the difference in experience was striking. Last year I had a family member or two with me so it was never a one-person ride. This year I came by myself, and felt lonely sitting in the back seat of a large Jaguar. I couldn’t look at the phone — those dots don’t really help with motion sickness — so I just listened to a podcast while staring through the window.

In contrast, I had excellent conversations with every taxi and Lyft driver on this trip. But I’ll skip recounting those lest I turn into Tom Friedman.

There is a big red circle of my MacBook Air’s System Settings icon. Oh no! Is it a system error? Is it an update? No! It is an offer to add the two Apple TV devices I have to an AppleCare One (Plus?) Plan!

Yes, these kinds of annoyances are becoming ever more salient.