The 20th day of the 4th month is a special day for everyone, most of all lovers of murder mysteries and fine art. This year, it is also the end of Ramadan.

But was it all worthy of the most expensive fireworks display to date?

I first hear about “date me” docs a few months ago, when someone I followed on Twitter shared his. Today, Tyler Cowen wrote a brief note about them and pointed to another one, from a (female) acquaintance of his.

As someone who’s been in a stable relationship for 14 years this month, I count my blessings every day that I don’t have to think about dating, in the US, in the 2010s and now the ’20s. And for the reason why, look no further than the ridiculous dating apps, and now “dating docs”, which remove all exploration, randomness, and surprise — which is to say everything human — out of the process of finding a partner. Serendipity Which was surprise in a prior version of the post but serendipity is a much better word; thank you, dear reader. in particular is underrated by those who think these documents are a good idea, both in finding out you have common interests with someone you were interested in, and in discovering new things that you wouldn’t have considered before.

Don’t get me wrong, it obviously works for someone — probably people who think a trustless financial system is a good idea — but it is clearly not for me. More worryingly, a portion of kids these days seems to enjoy eliminating everything Dr. Who ⊕ At least every Dr. Who up to and including David Tennant — things started getting depressing during the Capaldi years and I drifted away from watching…liked about humans. Which is an interesting thing to be happening at the same time when algorithms are starting to “hallucinate”, “lie”, and — let’s call it what it is — bullshit, which have for better or worse been typically human traits.

I shall now grab my walker and shuffle off into the sunset.

For your Saturday reading pleasure: How to Beat Roulette: One Gambler Figured It Out and Won Big

That one gambler was from Croatia, some of his gambling buddies were from Serbia, and the Bloomberg reporter had this typically Balkan interaction:

As I pressed him about computers, he threw up his hands in exasperation and started to argue with his friend. Is he angry, I asked. “No, that’s just how he talks,” the friend replied.

That is indeed just the way we talk.

To put in perspective some recent SCOTUS-related news, I was once, as a federal employee, chastised by the powers to be for not reporting my personal blog as an “outside activity”.

I made my feelings about Substack known a few days ago, so why should I care that a blue bird pooped on them?

Well, for one, while writing on Substack isn’t the best choice for most people, some do have things to say and say them well. And two, as much as it was clear that Twitter was in a death spiral, well, actually seeing it is quite a bit sadder than I thought it would be. Pour one out…

I’ve been on something of an RSS subscription spree. In addition to all the great micro.blog blogs (and many, many, many more…) there are a quite a few “old” blogs that I (re)discovered — my blogroll will need a serious update!

Notably absent from the new subscriptions are substack newsletters. It is unnerving to scroll down a website for the first time only to be interrupted by a request to subscribe, and a big draw of RSS, at least for me, is its unobtrusivness. It is there if you want it, but not in your face. The thought of following a blog regularly is of your own making, which is as it should be.

So to the bland design and the lack of control over your own content I would add this, much greater limitation of substack: choosing it to publish your writing — even if all your articles are free and unlocked, and you are honest-to-god only doing it because of ease of use — even with all that, choosing substack sends a strong signal that in the back of your mind there lies an idea that at some future point — maybe when you “have an audience”, maybe when you have “created your own platform” — at some unscpecified you’ll-know-it-when-you-get-there point you will click that big Monetize! button and you will ask people for money in exchange for your writing.

Not that there is anything wrong with that! In general. For other people. But not for me.

There is a chicken and egg problem here: I am after all a happy subscriber of Stratechery, I pay to read the Financial Times and The Atlantic, and I even subscribe to a substack newsletter or two. What is so bad about a previously free substack accepting payments? How is that any different?

The difference in how I feel about the two, I suspect, lies in substack making it too easy to monetize. There is a large group of people who are “natural bloggers”, and a much smaller subset of these who also have the mental fortitude to deal with the completely different dynamics of independent writing as a profession: consistently producing content and catering to your readers' demands — your are, after all, working for them — without falling prey to audience capture.

So, someone who could have been hapily microblogging for decades to come undergoes premature monetization, and all of a sudden performance anxiety sets in, their ideas dry up, their writing becomes sparse, and months pass before the next gargantuan article is published which fewer and fewer people will read. I won’t name names or link links, but it has happened before and will happen even more now that many are transitioning from Twitter. And on my end — knowing that this is a possibility with every completely-free-as-in-beer substack newsletter I am following — well, I don’t get too attached. I read less attentively. I always have doubts about why that particular topic came out (preparing the future paying audience, perhaps).

Friends don’t let friends write on substack.

WaPo is on a roll of good opinion articles. Today’s had advice on coping with the many crises we are told we are facing:

One cannot usefully address a threat to birds if they do not delight in individual birds. (Maybe not all of them, but some.) One cannot meaningfully answer the climate crisis if they lack excitement about the human capacity for invention and reinvention. One cannot make progress toward equality and inclusion if they don’t see and love the potential of humankind — enemies included — and one cannot build the future if one fears the future.

Indeed.

Subscribing to the Financial Times continues to pay off splendidly: just look at this Twitter thread from their chief statistician on the plummeting life expectancy in America. His (paywalled) column is even better.

Oh and it’s guns, drugs, and cars, in case you were wondering.

“The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.”

The Spectator has a profile of Nassim Taleb out today, and it is entertaining enough. E.g.:

Taleb had been busy. He had already published two papers since the new year, on statistical concepts that I asked him to explain to me as if I was five years old, to which he said, “you’re not five years old.”

Any of his 12 conversations with Russ Roberts would, of course, be a better use of your time. And as entertaining!