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.
That feeling you get when something a long time coming finally does come out
I have always admired prolific writers like Matthew Yglesias and Scott Alexander — both now on Substack, and not by accident — for their ability to produce tens of thousands of words daily, My admiration being tampered somewhat by ChatGPT and other LLMs, which are about as intellectually and factually rigorous as Alexander, and slightly less so than Yglesias; some sacrifices do have to be made in the name of productivity. on top of the random bite-sized thoughts posted on social media. There are only so many words I can read and write in a day, and for the better part of the last year, my language IO has been preoccupied by helping clean, analyze, interpret, and write up the results of a single clinical trial, which are now finally out in The Lancet Neurology. Yes, my highest impact factor paper to date is in a neurology journal. Go figure.
The paper is about our clinical trial which used the body’s own immune system to treat autoimmune disease — and a particular one at that, myasthenia gravis — via technology that up until now has only been used against cancer (CAR T cells). It has made a decent impact since it came out less than two days ago. It got a write-up in The Economist, for one. Endpoints News as well. Evaluate Vantage got the best quote — it is at the very end of the article. And there is a whole bunch of press releases: from National Institutes of Health, University of North Carolina, Oregon Health and Sciences University, and of course Cartesian Therapeutics.
What went on yesterday reminded me that Twitter is not going anywhere any time soon: all of the above releases were to be found only there, not on a Mastodon instance, the journal’s own media metrics do not — and can not, at least not easily — trawl the Fediverse for hits, and I can’t just type in “Descartes–08”, “myasthenia gravis CAR-T”, or “Cartesian” into a Mastodon search box and get anything of relevance. One could, of course, argue that you wouldn’t get anything of relevance on Twitter either, most of the discussion consisting of people who have barely read the tweet, let alone the article. And one would be correct. And while most of the non-Web3/crypto tech world has moved out, it looks like people in most other fields, from medicine to biotechnology to the NBA commentariat, are maintaining substantial Twitter presence.
This will, of course, have no impact on my commitment to staying out of the conversation to the extent possible while maintaining a semi-regular schedule of 500-character posts, which may now, IO bandwidth having opened up, become a tiny bit longer. Thank you for reading!