• 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.

• Doug Belshaw: Cash Value: Katherine Ryan, William James, and… getting on with it. Katherine Ryan is apparently a comedian (comedienne?) who:

…doesn’t spend time worrying whether the entertainment industry should work the way it does. She describes how it actually works and moves forward accordingly. “I love money,” she says simply, without apology or shame. This is pragmatism: the view that some approaches succeed and others fail, so you’d better figure out which ones work and act accordingly.

See what makes money and do it! A plan so fool-proof it is a true mystery why everyone isn’t a billionaire.

• Andrew Gelman: The pantheon of celebrity billionaires. In which Gelman comments on the following comment from an older post of his:

Pretty much nobody worships billionaires as a class. Most people worship at least one billionaire; that’s THEIR billionaire. Think old school paganism. Pantheon of gods, but a tribe will focus on one. A lot of immigrant Chinese Americans worship Elon Musk. Maybe it’s Donald Trump, or Kanye West, or Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, or Charlie Munger, or Warren Buffet, or Steve Jobs, etc.

Spot on! Somewhat surprisingly, Gelman’s never heard of Charlie Munger but if I had to pick a billionaire to “worship” (not that I would ever do such a thing), he could be the one. Certainly not Stevehole Jobs, and certainly not Munger’s partner Warren B.

• Hunter Walker: Triumph Of The Bill: Amazon’s $75 Million ‘Melania’ Movie Is A Corrupt, Fascistic Cinema Fest.

One billionaire scratches another’s back; hilarity ensues. The story is outlined further in the NYT, but John Gruber has the correct headline. I hope Mrs. Trump will be able to brush off the harsh reviews and use her $28M direct payment from Amazon to finally gain the much-needed financial independence to which every American woman aspires.

• Clare Moriarty for The Irish Times: No, objecting to the enormous wealth of billionaires is not begrudgery.

This is the meat of the issue, and kudos to Moriarty for putting it so bluntly. Each billionaire’s billions were built on the backs of real people doing real work while missing family events, growing stomach ulcers and ultimately dying of cancer. ⊕ If you think this is an exaggeration, do read a few accounts of what happens in even supposedly “good” multinationals. Well-meaning and good-hearted minnows never grow large enough to have to hide their money in Ireland. Financialization squeezed out their blood, sweat and tears and concentrated them into a handful of people who were clearly not well. ⊕ Mirroring what happens to companies, those who have a firm grasp of morality and a sense of self never get to the first billion. In that light, I don’t think relying on the billionaire class to “fix” anything — or even to correctly identify the problem — is a sensible idea, so it is a good thing indeed that the country celebrating its 250th birthday this year has a track record of putting them in their place.

• Ada Palmer: How is Inventing the Renaissance an SFF-Related Work? This is not the first time I have heard of Ada Palmer’s book about the renaissance. In fact, the book is how I found out about Ada Palmer in the first place. And after this preview it just had to end up on the pile.
• Ben Taub: Did a Celebrated Researcher Obscure a Baby’s Poisoning? Put this one in the holy smokes category. I have increased the subjective probability of my own pet conspiracy theory to 5% based on this absolutely bonkers tale of medical and scientific misconduct.
• Dan Q: That’s Not How Email Works, HSBC. A short tale of bureaucratic malpractice.
• Andrew Gelman: OK, I reread that classic paper by Paul Meehl, and . . . An important insight about the difference between how hard and soft sciences use statistics hidden below a bad title with even worse typography. Has Gelman never heard of ellipses?
• Nicolas P. Rougier: Get Things Done with Emacs. Yes, I need an intervention.

• 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.

I was down on podcasts at the beginning of the year, but three weeks into the year there were quite a few worth highlighting:

• Statecraft: What’s Wrong with NIH Grants. A level-headed view at the Lovecraftian horror that is the federal grants system, from someone who has been in that world for almost two decades. As I noted previously, anyone who wants to reform NIH should first understand it, and the interviewee Scott Kupor seems to know it well.
• Stratechery paycast: An Interview with United CEO Scott Kirby About Tech Transformation. United is one of the airlines that started suffering enshittification, but then seems to be turning around largely because of the customer-oriented approach of their CEO who is using their web platform to (shock! horror!) improve the travellers' experience. Of course, everything can be re-enshittified.
• Cory Doctorow: The Post-American Internet. Doctorow’s speech on how to make re-enshittification impossible, which has been particularly salient recently. The link is to the transcript. I have no idea how to link to that particular episode of the podcast on its own website — and if it even has one — so here is the link on Overcast.
• The Incomparable Mothership: Chekhov’s Chunga Palm. A herd of geeks discusses Pluribus — adorable in the best way possible.

• Sam Rodriques: The Humanity Project. The underlying assumption of this proposal is that the magic of AI will bring about thousands of new molecules and hypotheses on how they work, and that many of them will require testing in humans, and that we therefore better streamline how clinical trials are designed and run by yes, using LLMs. It is the healthcare ouroboros, now loaded with AI!
• Andrew Losowsky for The Markup: We posted a job. Then came the AI slop, impersonator and recruiter scam. Yet more ways in which LLMs are making hiring challenging, both upstream and downstream of my limited experience with meetings. (ᔥBen Werdmuller)
• Nick Schaden: Can the gaming industry adapt to a frozen market?. Gaming being among things suffering death by cloud was not on my radar but of course that it is! Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite are all “games as a service”, i.e. platforms, i.e. stasis generators. Now to find a way to explain to my kids why they are not allowed to spend any more time on Forsaken…
• Richard Griffiths: The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne’s Missing Commonplace Book. I never saw these lists of links as a commonplace book stand-in, but of course they are. Even the find-the-common-theme game was already there (which, duh, it is a common-place book)! I am, of course, closer to the illusion of integrated thought end of the spectrum so thank you for bearing with me, dear reader.

• Corey Ford: The Forwardable Email. How to make email introductions easier for everyone involved. I have been a big proponent of avoiding work emails ever since I read Cal Newport’s book, but they are essential for external communication and bringing people together is a common use case. I have bookmarked the site and will be using it frequently. (↬Ben Werdmuller)
• Jamie Hardesty on LinkedIn: LinkedIf. Since I never actually log in to LinkedIn, I encountered this as a screenshot on Thought Shrapnel. Remember that observation about the small-i internet?
• Anil Dash: How Markdown Took Over the World. I am typing this in markdown and previewing it in Brett Terpstra’s wonderful Marked 3, so I devoured this history-slash-analysis. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
• Saahil Desai for The Atlantic: America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster. Let’s leave the bad news for last. Maybe the story isn’t that everything is becoming financilized but rather that everything has become gambling. We have removed the Chesterton’s fence of gambling being taboo and now it’s everywhere. Maybe there was a reason our ancestors frowned upon it?

Have a great weekend, everyone, and if you are in most of the US hope you enjoy the snow more than you dread it.

• Kyla Scanlon: The Great Entertainment. Scanlon doesn’t mention the author or the book, but it is hard not to read her latest essay and not picture David Foster Wallace looking at the news stream of the past year, shaking his head. Because the world he conjured in Infinite Jest is, in fact, becoming real. So maybe his other essay wasn’t as outdated as I had thought.
• Aidan Walker: Clavicular and contentmaxxing. I don’t know about DFW but I was shaking my head throughout… this. One of the many benefits of middle-age is that I don’t know have to know about everything that the kids are up to. Price increases soon!
• Kei Kreutler: Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity. So, I noted recently as an aside that people were worried about the detrimental effects of writing on people’s ability to memorize. Well apparently this particular spinoff of the golden age fallacy predates even writing, as people were worried that particular memorization techniques like the memory palace would spoil the people’s “true” capability to remember. So maybe this is also a type of an appeal to nature? (↬Writing Slowly)
• Andrew Sharp: Five Questions About Victor Wembanyama. Oh my, Wemby does seem insufferable, and this is from someone who makes a point to read at least a page or two every day. At least he is not a flopper.

The final (?) update on my use of the service formerly known as Twitter: I have locked the account and logged out. I shied away from deleting it completely to prevent username squatting. All the posts are still available (and searchable!) thanks to micro.blog’s wonderful import function.

• Ted Gioia: 25 Propositions about the New Romanticism. Consider this the antidote to the techno-optimist bullshitfesto manifesto. It rings true.
• Chris Arnade: Engineering as Humanity’s Highest Achievement. But then so des the title of Arnade’s latest essay. The answer, of course, is est modus in rebus, including engineering.
• Ed Zitron: This Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble. “This” being the AI boom, which is putting its final putrid touches on the American rot economy.
• Lily Lynch: Europa.–Make War.–Zenitism.. Wherein Lynch attempts to triangulate one of the distant sources of the rot, which is the hypocrisy built into the foundations of the post-WW2 economy. I will add Lars von Trier’s Europa (1991) to my to-watch list.
• Kabir Chibber: What rewatching ‘The Wire’ taught me about nostalgia for a lost America. Here are more proximal sources. I remember watching the last season of The Wire in 2008 while on medical student exchange in Thailand. I spent the last two weeks on Koh Samui and passed the too-hot early afternoons in front of a tiny Asus Eee netbook (remember those?) watching Season 5, which back then I thought was too far-fetched in how it portraid the media. Maybe I should rewatch.
• Hollis Robbins: Embrace your lack. Let’s end on a positive note, with a review of another great TV show. I didn’t think that Pluribus was about LLMs at all, but Robbins makes a convincing case for a connection. May need to rewatch that one as well, and Season 2 isn’t event out yet.