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).

• Rusty Guinn: Conjuring Consent. Is ignorance, malice or cynicism behind ICE’s attempts to co-opt Lord of the Rings into their anti-immigration narrative? I would say it’s their propensity to bullshit, which matches Guinn’s cynicism take. See also: Guinn on the “woke right”.
• Neil Armstrong for the BBC: Slow Horses: The anti-James Bond that gets to the heart of Britishness. Written last year just after Season 4 started, but seeing as Season 5 was even better it is truer than ever.
• Tanner Garity: Kurt Vonnegut’s Advice for Making the Most of Your Day. Read this only for the exceptionally relevant story from Vonnegut’s 1995 interview with Inc., which isn’t the primary link because it lies behind a paywall. A Vonnegut quote from that interview: “The information superhighway will be two lanes loaded with tollgates, and it’s going to tell you what to look for.”
• Oliver Burkeman: You have to do the living yourself. In which Burkeman answers the question of “Isn’t there something I could do, some rule I could follow, such that if I obediently followed the rule, I wouldn’t have to show up for life, in all its uncertainty and riskiness and intensity, in quite such a full-on way? So I could sort of hang back, hide out, and take things a bit easier instead?” and of course the answer is no.

As a not-so-recent graduate of a medical fellowship program, I often get spammy job offers via email, text, LinkedIn messages, etc, some of them with promises of eye-popping income. A memorable add mentioned over $800,000 annual compensation for a position in Caribou, Maine. It was telling that I was getting it for at least a year before it stopped, and if you were the brave soul who took up the job then please get in touch, I would like to hear how it’s been!

Often, the number is not mentioned at all. Those jobs have a clear advantage in terms of the institution, geographic location and time commitment. All others fall into two categories: “up to” and “guaranteed”. A decade-plus of reading Nassim Taleb’s writing has taught me to avoid the up-to and value the guaranteed.

Many people focus on “benefiting from disorder”, but this is in fact the basic asymmetry behind Antifragile, which Taleb touched on even earlier in his books. Cap the losses and yes, stay open for high — ideally unlimited — upside, but avoiding ruin takes precedence.

The up-to/at-least dichotomy is broader than job postings. “Up-to” precedes many numbers and sometimes, fair enough, it is important to mention and valid in the conversation. But sometimes — often? — it is uttered under the breath and while clearing throat to yell out a large number that is meant to impress, change minds, open up hearts… and wallets.

“You could earn up to $900,000 per year”, if you see 40 patients per day five days a week with 10 days off for the entire year. Extrapolate to other areas of life as need.

Drywalls weren’t a thing when I was growing up in Serbia and I don’t think they are used even now. I avoided putting up shelves as the whole stud-finding procedure was a bit of a dark art that could go very wrong in my inattentive hands, never mind that the placement was just too constraining — I didn’t want the placement of a towel rod to be decided by a home builder from 30 years ago. Then I discovered toggle bolts (also known as butterfly anchors), and I have been putting up shelves, hooks, screen mounts and other bits of hardware with wild abandon.

Now, using toggle bolts will leave behind a comically large holes if you ever change your mind about wall placement. This hasn’t happened to me yet, but when it does I will know to go to YouTube, which has become a living encyclopedia of crafts. Just in the last two months it has helped me with replacing a microwave circuit board and fixing a pair of broken shades, and I am no handyman. This is why I would never lump in YouTube together with TikTok, Instagram and other soul-sucking services, though it is always good to turn off the recommendations.

My third bit of advice is also wall-related: for anything you wanted to hang that’s too light to warrant a toggle bolt, use 3M’s Command strips. Yes they are just a tiny bit wasteful since you can’t reuse the one that’s stuck on a wall, but unlike nails or pieces of colored sticky rubber, they will not leave any trace once removed. They are a renter’s best friend.

And if you are renting, do not be afraid to change things around if you are in a managed property and don’t have the owner acting as landlord. Each time I moved out they person doing the walk-through was surprised by how unchanged everything was, and each time I thought to myself that I should have hung up that towel rod, or anchored that Kallax shelf to the wall.

When moving, the ideal is to hire someone to do everything for you, from packing to load to driving and the unloading. If you don’t have the means for it (and I haven’t), at least hire someone for the loading/unloading part, preferably someone with experience. Either way, if you pack yourself, packing everything save for large pieces of furniture into boxes — there should be nothing irregularly shaped that’s not in a box. And yes, I truly mean everything, even (especially!) the groceries.

So whenever you come by a trinket and wonder to yourself whether you should get it, for yourself or as a present for your children or significant other, picture yourself coming across it while packing for another move and try to imagine how would you feel: glad that you got to keep the memento, or resentful that it became just another piece of detritus that you have to stuff in a box.