While responding to a tweet I realized that an essential emoji was missing from the ever-expanding collection: one for RSS feeds. Come on, people, it’s not difficult.
Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic:
I first encountered The Making of the Atomic Bomb in March, when I spoke with an AI researcher who said he carts the doorstop-size book around every day. (It’s a reminder that his mandate is to push the bounds of technological progress, he explained—and a motivational tool to work 17-hour days.) Since then, I’ve heard the book mentioned on podcasts and cited in conversations I’ve had with people who fear that artificial intelligence will doom us all.
I can see the appeal, but calling The Making of… “The Doomer Bible” is uncharitable to both books.
Microsoft is replacing Calibri as its default Office font. Good riddance, it was never a good fit for long text.
But, seeing a 100-page document — a clinical protocol, say — set in Calibri was a sure sign the people who wrote it didn’t care, and that signal is now lost. Is the tradeoff worth it?
Microsoft is changing our household’s recipe game: no more bad photocopies or thick books on the counter when you can snap a photo and convert it to Word (and, when I have time, Markdown) in the Office365 app. This one is for a delicious saffron-almond cake, from The Flavor Thesaurus. ⏲️
One benefit of being a one-man show is the freedom to share your thought process and workflows without fear of inadvertently disclosing information that others may find sensitive. Which is to say: I love what @davidsmith is doing on his blog — the latest post is what prompted me to write this — and podcast. More of this, please.
The two most recent episodes of EconTalk, equally engrossing, could not have been more different:
But it is only Rebanks’ I would listen to again, and his book is now on my to-read list.
Having deleted my Facebook account nearly a decade ago, and last having logged in to Instagram back in 2012, I had no expectations of Threads. With quick onboarding and a pleasant enough first impression, those expectations were exceeded.
I won’t be coming back, but if they enable ActivityPub and make the “official” accounts — medical societies and NBA teams for me, please — accessible from micro.blog, it will be a win for everyone.
Well, almost everyone.
Magic, Mundanity and Deep Protocolization:
Nudge technology as conceived by behavioral economists turned out to be irreproducible nonsense, but nudge technology as embodied by AI will be real, and beyond anything Sunstein and Thaler dreamed of.
I haven’t appreciated Venkatesh Rao recently, but this is a good article! Bonus points for teaching me about the Balenciaga meme.
My love for Google Reader — may it rest in peace — will never die, so when The Verge comes out with a 4,000-word piece on its creation, flourishing, and untimely demise, I must link to it.
Google killed Reader before it had the chance to reach its full potential. But the folks who built it saw what it could be and still think it’s what the world needs. It was never just an RSS reader. “If they had invested in it,” says Bilotta, “if they had taken all those millions of dollars they used to build Google Plus and threw them into Reader, I think things would be quite different right now.”
Pour one out…
Browser check
Four months after switching to Edge, it is still going strong as my default browser. The Bing sidebar is now the first thing I turn to with questions about code of any kind (the last two examples: how to assign the current screen width to a variable in AppleScript, and how to create custom color gradients for a heat map in Mathematica; the first one it got in the first try, we needed three attempts for the second). The compose pane has seen less use — my day job requires less BS generation than I originally feared — but is still a marvelous tool for writer’s block prevention: just knowing it can produce text-on-demand makes my own words flow to compete.
Add vertical tabs, split window panes, web app creation, bookmarklet support (while some other Safari competitors refuse to acknowledge that bookmarks — yes, bookmarks, even exist), and did I mention it was fast? It will take a lot to switch to something else.
For the first time this century, Microsoft has my attention.