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!

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.