The five or so regulars readers of this blog may have noticed a pattern of promises made and not kept of things I will, may, or should discuss at some future, unspecified point. These were usually somewhere in the margin notes, but sometimes I would end with a cliffhanger. The topics included mental models, notable microblogs, and ABIM’s financial shenenigans; in my head, the list was significantly longer, and the items expanded into 1,000+ word posts that would be a slog to reference, a nightmare to edit, and which no one would ultimately read.

Up until last year, whatever I thought about those topics would stay in my head, waiting for the stars to align and for the Gods of chaos and time Also known as my children. to smile upon their humble servant. Which is a net good for the reading public — who needs to read the unbaked thoughts of an oncologist? — but as Cory Doctorow wrote, having one’s thoughts written down is good practice both for developing them and for future reference. I was, in a way, depriving my future self of the benefit of knowing how big of a fool my past self was.

But ever since learning of the micro.blog/MarsEdit combination This is Miraz Jordan’s brief YouTube introduction to the two; 15 minutes of time well spent if you have even a tiny bit of interest., I’ve maintained a daily log of thoughts, readings, viewings, and writings. The low friction of the tools begs for scattered non-sequiturs and word salads — think of an unkempt Obsidian database — but the semi-social veneer that micro.blog provides tempers my worst instincts and makes the posts better overall for everyone exposed, including my future self. Sure, those longer texts still don’t get written — although, just watch this one grow! — but for personal use the snippets are even more valuable (and easier to skim).

Not everyone should be a capital-b Blogger — or have a gated newsletter for that matter — but many more people could benefit from a small-p personal blog of the commonplace type. The reason I bristle at overproduced “content” and at statements that anyone who writes must give it their all, strive to perfect everything they write above the 80%-done good-enough-for-government-work standard that is close to my heart, is that they create the wrong impression of what blogging could/should/would be if it hadn’t been for the Huffington Posts and the Gawkers of the peak-blog internet that equated blogging with monetization. And also why I took an initial dislike of The Curator’s Code despite its obvious usefulness. Why should personal blogging be standardized? It’s Personal!

And if you want to find some of these to read, for instruction, inspiration, or just plain enjoyment? Outside of the great micro.blog blogs — check out the Discover page for a daily sampling — there is Dave Winer’s scripting.com, John Naughton’s Memex, Ian Betteridge’s Technovia, Reader John’s Tipsy Teetotaler, Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, and oh so many more.

Phrase of the day: digital dandruff. Thank you, Charlie Warzel.

I’ve recently had to do a simple but tedious literature search: finding the incidence and prevalence of a handful of rare diseases, using only peer-reviewed articles as reference. The perfect job for AI, some would yes. Well, yes for an AI, but apparently not for LLMS.

I am a proponent of using LLMs as tools of the spellcheck sort, but they are still not ready to act as serious research assistants. Bing presented me with gobbledygook that ended with a repeating string of “KJKJKJKJ” or some such — and no, my prompt was not for it to pretend a cat was walking over the keyboard — while Bard gave a beautifully formatted table full of inaccurate numbers and fake references. Correcting it would have taken more time than doing the research myself.

Which is to say: I anticipate a lot of angst when incoming students start passing off unadulterated LLM work as their own in anything that’s not a business writing course.

Kudos to @danielpunkass for making MarsEdit idiot-proof. I was writing a long-ish text this morning and while uploading the photo the app crashed, an unsaved post disappeared, and my heart sank. But on restart, everything was still there. Phew! ❤️

Jason Snell notes that the iMac’s strongest legacy was Apple itself:

The company was close to bankruptcy when Jobs returned, and the iMac gave the company a cash infusion that allowed it to complete work on Mac OS X, rebuild the rest of the Mac product line in the iMac’s image, open Apple Stores, make the iPod, and set the tone for the next twenty five years.

I’m currently reading The Dao of Capital, which is all about the Austrian school of economics and the roundaboutness of true entrepreneurs, and this made what Apple is doing even more salient. Can you name a more roundabout tech company than Apple? ⊕ To be clear, I suspect little of this was premeditated in the long term — i.e. no, Jobs and Ive probably did not have a Vision Pro in mind as the ultimate goal when they thought of the iMac — but the ethos of seeing everything as a potential intermediary and not commoditizing it fully à la Samsung is very much the Apple way. Using the iMac as the intermediate step towards the iPod, which was itself an intermediate step towards the iPhone, which was supposedly to be an intermediate step towards the iPad but turned into something much greater, though it also did end up being an intermediate step towards Apple silicone, all the while peppering these intermediary products with technology — LiDAR, ultra-wide lenses, spatial audio — that would become the key building blogs of Vision Pro, which is itself an intermediary towards who knows what. Very Austrian.

Thinking more closely to home, I can think of a few biotech companies that may be doing something like this — maybe, if you squint — but none come close. The addiction to immediate profits that the distorted American health care market provides is much too great.(↬Daring Fireball)

This weeks’s Galaxy Brain from Charlie Warzel, about the apparent decline of Wirecutter, is spot on:

Wirecutter’s trajectory is the story of what the internet does to most great ideas: It forces them to scale, and then others replicate the concepts at varying levels of quality until, eventually, an economic, algorithmic wildfire is burning. The original is consumed and left in a scarred landscape.

Not just the internet, I would say. It’s the American way of doing everything!

“In Defense of the Yugo”:

The Yugo had problems, but it also had the right idea: a cheap, fuel-efficient, sensibly sized car where the only point is transportation from one place to another. Cars as conspicuous consumption has been a disaster for the planet and for society at large. The end goal is to move away from car dependency and toward actually sustainable transportation — but as long as we have cars, small and fuel-efficient is the standard by which we should build them.

The Yugo as a foot soldier in the war against cars? Checks out.

I love that micro.blog hosts blogs as static websites. But if I were ever to need a non-blog static website, FastMail would be my number 1, 2, 3… host of choice. They’ve managed my email for a decade and have been nothing but outstanding. ↬This day’s portion

Three months ago I would have thought this recognize-the-scam quiz from The Washington Post was too easy, misguided, just useless. But I’ve recently seen my dad interact with the modern Web, and I strongly recommend you forward this link to anyone you know who is over 70.

As obscure public intellectuals go, Rao is fairly well known online, but every day, somebody’s born who’s never seen The Flintstones, and the man does have a knack for packaging phenomena both permanent and ephemeral into digestible mental models which you can use again and again. Sure, you could check out his official New Reader guide — and there is some match between that and the list below — but doesn’t a bespoke list on an even more obscure personal blog make it more adventurous?

• The Gervais Principle, which should have been a book (and is much better than his only actual book). You will never look at office dynamics the same way again.
• The Cactus and the Weasel, the extension of the hedgehog and the fox dichotomy which made me fall in love with 2x2s, and also realize that I was a fox trying to fit in with a crowd of hedgehogs.
• The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial, wherein he coined the syntagm “premium mediocre” which perfectly captured the 2010s esthetics
• A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars, which made me want to spend as little time as possible on social networks in general, and one social network in particular, which is a good thing!
• The Internet of Beefs, which finally made sense of the ridiculous back-and-forths which were so common on Twitter X.
• Against Waldenponding, which earned him an invite to the best podcast out there, and which is also the reason I am writing this, having recently been reminded of Rao’s work.

Enjoy the multiple branching rabbit holes!