Here is a great quote on leadership in John Gruber’s pre-post-mortem of Apple Intelligence:

The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.

“Leadership” is a suitcase word and although I disagree with most of the concepts packed into it, maybe it has not become completely useless.

Some pre-weekend reading:

• Fertility on Demand by Ruxandra Teslo
• The Nikola Jokić problem: Why we will never fully explain his brilliance
• Wikipedia: Monkey selfie copyright dispute (learned about this from the offspring)
• The hardest working font in Manhattan ← my pick of the week

Sentences to get depressed about:

The Great Multitasking Panic of the Late Oughts ended, like all panics, not because we found a solution, but because we just…stopped panicking. […] Most of our fears ended up being right, but by then we weren’t afraid. Grandma got an iPad, and it was game over.

From Adam Mastroianni, excellent as always.

This is explained, sort of, by her being descended from Serbian cat people. At one point in the movie a very catlike woman addresses her, in Serbian, as moja sestra — “my sister.”

I am always on the lookout for an unexpected mention of my people, and Alan Jacobs delivered.

I always thought it was good news when an RSS feed on my “Paused and Defunct” list woke up, but it looks like sometimes these feeds wake up as zombies. The latest one is Thought Catalog which I followed for the occasional post from Ryan Holiday but is now dead as a website and posting random articles like this on its feed.

Fortunately Ryan Holiday still has a blog, doing his part to prevent the web from becoming auto-generated slop.

Earlier this year I mentioned the anonymous X account Crémieux as a proponent of the concept of “National IQ”. Now we know the person behind that account, and the truth is in fact quite boring. This is the line between having a pseudonym and creating a sock puppet. (↬Sasha Gusev)

A great one today from Chris Arnade, about Walking in Beijing. I will quote a few paragraphs but there is much much more:

To someone who has been raised on horror stories written in foreign papers, there is a surprising anything-goes attitude in China, outside of a few institutions. The internet firewall is annoying, but everyone gets around it, and everyone knows everyone does. Very bad things do happen in China, but the overwhelming majority of people also go about their daily lives much like anyplace else, focusing on daily tasks, local gossip, sports, family matters, career advancement, love lost and love wanted, rather than the political maneuverings of the political class. The Chinese are chill, fun, and open—at least about as much as you can be when living in a city with the aesthetic of an overly engineered corporate business park.

There is, when you look closer, a great deal of chaos in Beijing, some of which is simply about incompetence or a lack of care from the vast array of minor officials and bureaucrats, but most of it is from the surprisingly optimistic attitude of the residents. China doesn’t feel like an oppressive police state the way the Soviet bloc once did, because the Chinese, rather than being corrupted by anger, are sincere, thoughtful, grateful, happy, warm, efficient, genuine, and caring. To the degree that they are cynical (an attitude that dominates most oppressive authoritarian states) there is a playfulness to it, not a bitterness. An “Oh, did you see what silly thing the party did again?” rather than a sense of living through an existential terror.

So far so good. But:

Simply put, it’s unclear what China’s ultimate goal is beyond accumulating wealth and expanding its cities—eventually stretching its metro system to the 98th expressway ring, then the 400th—until the entire country fuses into a single vast urban sprawl. What is the end game? What is the Chinese guardian class working toward? Anyone who still believes it’s the old Marxist vision of eliminating capitalism and creating a classless, stateless society is deluding themselves.

[…]

I’m currently writing this in Korea, and the contrast between Beijing and Seoul is fascinating, mostly in an unflattering way to Beijing. Despite what I wrote above, I am happy to be out of Beijing and in Seoul. It is refreshing to be able to quickly read whatever I want and talk to whomever I want without having to jump through all sorts of hoops, regardless of how ineffective and symbolic they are.

Some good photos there too. Seems to be a place that’s better for living in than visiting — the anti-New York.

The “Real World Risk Institute” — RWRI — is Nassim Taleb’s answer to the question of what his Incerto would look like if it were a course. The twentieth workshop starts on July 7 and lasts for 2 weeks. This is what I wrote on that other site in response to the announcement:

Strongly endorse. Took the first one in July 2020 and if it weren’t for it I’d still be a federal employee on a visa. It’s not the knowledge you get (you have the Inecrto (sic!) for that), it’s the thinking

And I meant every misspelled word. Go if you have time: scholarships are available, math is not required.

My Kind of Conservatism:

Meanwhile the old-guard Democrats are holding solemn press conferences, still wearing suits and pantsuits, standing behind podiums to speak to the rolling cameras of television networks. They are ghosts addressing ghosts. “Sure, it’s not 1985 now,” Homer Simpson once said, when Marge tried to throw out his old calendars, “but you never know what the future might bring.” This is the message we are currently getting from Chuck Schumer and the others.

“Ghosts addressing ghosts” applies to more than just politicians speaking on mainstream media.

I have a rarely-updated list of articles I look at once a week, and randomly pick one to re-read. This week it was time for the first one on the list, which is Paul Graham’s Life is Short. I have obviously been ignoring it, likely because of its position, because I haven’t been following the sage advice:

The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to be consciously aware of it. Back when life was more precarious, people used to be aware of death to a degree that would now seem a bit morbid. I’m not sure why, but it doesn’t seem the right answer to be constantly reminding oneself of the grim reaper hovering at everyone’s shoulder. Perhaps a better solution is to look at the problem from the other end. Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do. Don’t wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don’t need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn’t wait. Just don’t wait.

In 2023 there was an exhibit of Leonardo DaVinci’s sketches in D.C., three blocks away from me. But I didn’t see it, because one thing or other kept getting in the way until the very last day, which was so packed with meetings that the work ended after the last admission time.

Lesson learned, right? Well, no, because just recently there was another big show close by (I won’t tell how close lest I allow your, reader, to triangulate my home address). This time we did go, only to balk at the overly long lines and go see something else at the National Art Gallery (incidentally, a work of Leonardo’s). Which was good! But then picking the time when we wouldn’t need to wait was impossible, and we never got to see that exhibit either.

So yes don’t wait, and also when you read and re-read an essay try to at least remember the highlights. This is a memo to self not advice, but could serve as one.