• Dan Frank: 15 theses on the optimization crisis: or why so many are dissatisfied with society, despite our prosperity. I can but nod along, as I have noted these soul-deadening tendencies myself a few times before. Point number 9 was particularly salient as I read about Robert De Niro’s hotel chains and George Clooney’s old tequila business, perpetuating the cycle of greed and envy.
• David Cain: Maybe the Default Settings Are Too High. An argument for slowing down most things you do, with an emphasis of reading. Pairs nicely with Alan Jacobs' advice on reading, particularly the second paragraph.
• Andrew Gelman: How much of an NBA team’s won-loss record is from skill and how much is luck? Gelman provides a neat step-by-step account of a statistical exploration which you will appreciate even if you are not a basketball fan. Note his advice on slowing down and thinking about what to expect before performing an analysis. After this you will have an idea of how much the practitioners of journalist science leave out in their final write-ups.
• Steve Dylan: How Gemini Gives Me Hope for a Future Internet. No, not Google’s LLM, but a text-based protocol that reimagines how hypertext on the Internet could work. And if it seems cumbersome compared to even “surfing the web” — let alone mindlessly thumbing down a social feed — well, there lies much of the point!
• Charlie Buckland for BBC Wales: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years. Just a feel-good story for the holiday season, to be read slowly and enjoyed.

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!

• Adam Mastroianni: So you wanna de-bog yourself. Mastroianni has a playful way with words that is a joy to read regardless of the topic, but this one in particular fits nicely in the New Year resolution-making season. It is Oliver Burkeman-like advice condensed into shorter snippets, for those who have not yet reached middle age.
• David Allen (or whoever writes his newsletter): The biggest secret about goal setting. Note that there is a big difference between setting your own personal goals and the several steps-removed goals that management gives to their teams. The bit about changing the saliency landscape applies to both.
• Yann LeCun: “the concept (of general intelligence) is compete BS”; the Nobel prize winner Demis Hassabis disagrees. But the fourth paragraph of that rebuttal is precisely what LeCun was talking about (mistaking specific for the general because it has “general” in the name).
• Karl Schroeder: Stop Thinking. ⊕ ᔥJohn Naughton On the difference between “understanding” — which is the analytical method that the people in the rationalist community, LLMs, and Mr. Spock do extremely well — and “reasoning”, which I understand (hah!) to be more akin to Charlie Munger’s mental models, applied intuitively, fluidly, and to the rationalist’s eyes haphazardly. Feel free to apply this distinction to the debate one bullet point above.
• Lily Lynch: Serbia’s Vučić Enters Deeper International Isolation. Could not have happened to a more deserving person! Although of course this means nothing but bad news for my fatherland so I wish El Presidente all the best in the New Year and may what is left of his reign be peaceful if not very long.

Infrastructure weekend continues. After changing the fonts, I have decided to simplify the color scheme and (finally!) change the name of the blog from micro.blog’s default, which was my own name, to the “Infinite Regress” heading. My name standing there in big bold letters looked a bit too self-promotional.

Of course, that means that there are now two Infinite Regress blogs — here is the old one — but I guess I will have to reconcile that some other time. The original idea was to post small updates here and keep the old domain for a digital garden-like website, but then I realized that 1) I don’t care much for digital gardens, and 2) there are enough self-referential links here to justify the name. And I already had the infinity symbol up in front of untitled posts. Easy decision.

None of this should matter if you are following along via RSS, which is in fact my preferred method and the reason why these updates are so overdue. Unfortunately, the Tufte theme side notes and margin notes don’t transfer well to feed readers and end up looking like an unintentional insertion. This is item number 1 for my next infrastructure weekend. Number 2 would be figuring out which domain name forwards where. Number 3, of course, is world domination.

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.

It’s Caturday Night Fever (or lack thereof).

• Oliver Burkeman: Interest is everything. The argument for living a life that is interesting to yourself, with which I agree. I have also learned about type 2 burnout in which “you’re not overworked, you’re just working against your own grain.” That too is interesting.
• Casey Handmer: Antimatter Development Program. A ridiculously (to my untrained in physics mind) detailed writeup of what could be the next generation of rocket fuel. To the above point: Handmer’s interest in the topic is contagious.
• Sacha Fast: One (and another) Gear in the Zettelkasten Machine: A Deep Dive into a Key Mechanism. Another person writing about a topic they love, which is slip-boxes. These kinds of posts are dangerous because this interest too is contagious but unlike Handmer’s is also immediately actionable at home. Caveat lector!
• Tanner Greer: The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite. Nominally a book review, actually an essay that surpasses the said book in its coverage of the topic.
• Ben Hunt: World War AI and Nick Maggiulli: Is This How the AI Bubble Pops? with two angles converging on the same conclusion, which is that our interesting times are about to become even more interesting.

Happy Thanksgiving, dear reader!

It is infrastructure day on the blog today, with two updates:

1. The Blogroll is now a fresh export from my feed reader and an accurate representation of what I am actually reading. I still need to figure out how to make the very detailed “About” field for each entry actually show up, so stay tuned for that one.
2. The Now page had its biannual refresh. I will at some point make it a more frequent ritual but best not to expect real-time reading/watching/listening lists.

And then there were six (parents inclusive). Pardon any potential interruptions to our scheduled programing.

🎮 Our 6-year-old has completed both Astro Bot and Astro’s Playroom, mostly by himself, with minimal help from older sisters, and when I say “complete” I mean digging into every nook and cranny and getting all of the trophies. Quite the soundtrack, too (Crash Site is the favorite).