So it looks like the new Pokemon game is buggy as hell. This brings back fond memories of TES II: Daggerfall which way nearly unplayable when it first came out but after a half-dozen or so patches became my favorite game of all time.

It is remarkable how quickly the new Verge homepage became my go-to for tech information. Nilay Patel’s introductory article from two months ago was prescient.

Eleven years have passed since the 11/11/11 release of Skyrim. Tempus fugit.

And the day is off to a great start!

I have heard nothing but good things about the Playdate, save for the screen not being viewable under direct sunlight. Good thing it will be a wet, cold October in DC.

Orange tabby cat wearing a crown: Stable Diffusion running on a meager M1 versus Midjourney running on who knows what. Either way, the visual arts will never be the same.

Drummer is an online outliner that enables quick, easy, and near real-time posting of text both long form and short — what we used to call blogs back in the good old days of two years ago. Dave Winer created it for his own purposes, but it works beautifuly with just your Twitter account as a login. Here is my page.

As things are still very much in progress, Dave recommended doing daily backups. Sadly, I didn’t, and as of today’s updates a few weeks' worth of half-baked notes are wiped out from the Drummer server (but thankfully not from the website they helped create). That’ll teach me.

Since posting to that page is on hold until everything is back in order, expect more — dare I say daily — updates here. Managing markdown files is not nearly as intutitive or pleasant to use as Dave’s outliner, but he seemes to be working on an OPML to markdown converter. That will be well worth the wait.

I, for one, am glad that blogs are making a comeback. Here are a few I’ve been reading for at least a few months, many of them for years, some for decades.

Applied philosophers

The only true philosophers of our time.

• Mathflaneur (by Nassim Taleb)
• Ribbonfarm (by Venkatesh Rao, who also has a newsletter of half-baked ideas he calls Ribbonfarm Studio)

The new scientists

People without major academic credentials who have interesting ideas about science.

• Alexey Guzey (also see Guzey’s Best of Twitter, and also see New Science)
• Applied Divinity Studies
• Astral Codex Ten (former Slate Star Codex)
• Fantastic Anachronism
• Gwern
• Nintil

The old scientists

People with major academic credentials and interesting ideas, something to teach, or both.

• I am Intramural (from the NIH Intramural Research Program)
• Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science by Andew Gelman
• Statistical Thinking by Frank Harrell
• Stephen Wolfram Writings
• The Mathematical Oncology Blog (see also This week in Mathematical Oncology)

The ludites

People against modernity of one sort or another.

• Axiom of Chance (Simon DeDeo, who does not seem to have a Twitter account)
• Patrick Rhone (who does have a Twitter account)
• Study Hacks (by Cal Newport, whose Twitter account, if real, has been abandoned years ago)
• Wrath of Gnon (who is in fact — and sadly — all Twitter)

People doing their own thing

Unclassifiable but exhilarating.

• Craig Mod (and on Twitter) who walks, makes books, and takes photos.
• Garden of Forking Paths (by Abe Callard, who watches movies)
• Rands in Repose (by Michael Lopp, who manages people)
• The Sephist (by Linus, who makes his own software tools)
• Thought Asylum (by Stephen Millard, who makes other people’s software tools more usable)

Apple enthusiasts

Some tips, a few tricks, many opinions.

• And now it’s all this
• Brett Terpstra (if you have a Mac and use it for more than just browsing the internet and answering email — not that there is anything wrong with that — Terpstra’s tools will save you days of work; he could easily have been slotted in the category above, but the Apple tag predates all and he is an Apple lifer)
• Daring Fireball (by John Gruber)
• Hypercritical (a sadly neglected blog by John Siracusa although what you should really check out is the podcast of the same name which has been out of production for years but still fun and relevant)
• Macdrifter
• Marco.org (by Marco Arment)

Finance-adjacent

Economists and investors, for the most part.

• Global Inequality (by Branko Milanović)
• Marginal Revolution (by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok who also wrote an excellent textbook in economics which I plan on reading some day, likely in retirement)
• Pseudoerasmus (the last post was in 2017 so I’m not holding out any hope, though he is on Twitter)
• The Rational Walk (see also Rational Reflections and the Twitter account)
• 10-K diver (as close to a blog that a Twitter account can get)

Journalist-cum-substackers

Former or current journalists who now earn some or all of their living by writing newsletters via Substack, which is slowly reinventing blogs (in the sense of reinventing the wheel, not actually making them better and in fact in many was making them much worse).

• Everything Studies (by John Nerst)
• Galaxy Brain (by Charlie Warzel)
• Insight (by Zeynep Tufekci, who is hands down the best journalist currently writing)
• Slow Boring (by Matthew Yglesias)

Company blogs

For when I really want to know when the next update is coming.

• Devonian Times, from the makers of my note-collecting tool of choice, DEVONthink
• The Omni Group, makers of OmniFocus (and OmniGraffle, which I don’t use often enough for it to be essential but which is fairly
• Wolfram Blog, from the makers of Mathematica

This is all about work email. I have succeeded in transferring most personal communication to Slack, iMessage, and WhatsApp, with a sprinkling of Skype for the grandparents. The sole holdout is Dad, who insists on emailing me links to Serbian tabloid news, child rearing advice, and recipes.

Inbox Zero is a great idea in its original form: live you life and write your emails in a way that solicits as few return emails to you as possible. It means giving some thought to what you put in your responses, and being clear and definitive about them. It doesn’t mean mindlessly deleting or archiving everything or, even worse, sending out half-baked replies just to pass on the baton when you’ll get a dozen of them in return.

I only check email twice a week day and once on a weekend, and with the explicit intent to clean out the inbox (unless when on service or when I’m the primary attending for a sick inpatient). Never check email “just to see what’s there” unless you have the time and the means to do something about whatever you’ll find. More than once in the past I was left to sour over an unexpected administrative roadblock or a non-urgent patient care calamity during a family event, when I could have just as easily waited for Monday morning.

When scheduling meetings: Doodle (or your preferred equivalent) for more than three people, email is fine for 1 or 2. If using email and I’m scheduling, proposed times, location, and a tentative agenda are all in the initial email. If I’m responding to a meeting request I try to put all of those in my reply, but that also depends on who’s requesting.

I thank in advance, not after the fact, and rarely send emails whose sole purpose is to give thanks.

If I get an unsolicited and unexpected email from someone I don’t know but that’s not obviously a mass posting, I wait for the second one. Most times it never arrives.

If the email looks like it came from a template it gets deleted without being read.

If I am cc’d on an email chain with many recipients and not directly called out, I archive and wait it out. The only exception is when I know that one or two replies from me would be able to end the game of email chicken that these chains tend to become.

The few times that I didn’t follow these guidelines, I came to regret it (confirmation bias warning!). I’m sure plenty of people don’t give it a second thought and go by just fine. But they probably don’t work in health care.

Update: Out of Office messages are equally important, and covered well here. My own recent OoO message was as explicit as it could get without using profanity, and hopefully conveyed the sentiment that no, I won’t be checking messages at all.

For better or worse, the American system of government is strong. Those who say otherwise have a financial interest in people thinking the opposite.

Culturally, US has more similarities with Iran than with Saudi Arabia, even if you count religion and religiosity as part of culture. The Christian right is working hard to make them even more similar.

Though still quite hard, it’s easier for a high-skilled immigrant to come to America than to any other country in the world. Comparison is even more favorable for low-skilled and unskilled immigrants. For all of them, quality of life, acceptance, and protection they get are better than anywhere else.

The randomness of the Green Card lottery process is a feature not a bug.

Reading the non-fiction sections of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and whatever their conservative equivalents are, is good for generating fake insight but ultimately pointless. The Economist is useful for a tiny segment of the population but lets be real: if you’re reading this you are not it.

The only useful section in the daily newspapers is Local. Maybe Sports, if you are into that sort of thing, but professional and college sports are a scam so stick with the amateur leagues.

TSA agents and airline personnel are nice people but some passengers check out their brains at the curb and make everyone’s lives less pleasant.

Apple hardware products are underpriced for what you get but do you actually need what they offer? This doesn’t include the AirPods, which are the best thing Apple has made in the last 20 years and still underpriced; though they unfortunately resemble in both name and appearance a mind control method from Doctor Who S2 and paired with a smart phone are not far from it.

The world doesn’t need another IPA. America needs more tripels.

This is all coming from a non-immigrant resident alien with no expertise in politics, international law, transportation, or technology. I do know beer though.

Now they are coming for the doctors (see What’s New in Version 3.0.5). The makers of MedCalc, the best medical calculator app out there, explained what happend in detail. ⊕ Seeing that URL made me appreciate the developers even more. This was the rule they were supposedly infringing:

22.9 Apps that calculate medicinal dosages must be submitted by the manufacturer of those medications or recognized institutions such as hospitals, insurance companies, and universities.

Nevermind that many doctors view themselves as institutions—this is an idiotic rule. Is University of Baltimore, which has no biomedical science courses or programs, allowed to publish a drug dose calculator? Is GEICO?

The FDA has issued guidance for mobile medical apps. It specificaly allows calculators that use generally available formulas, and forbids apps which calculate radiation dosage, but does not mention drugs. Where, then, did this rule come from?

It is, of course, the same App store rules that allowed these pearls of quackery.

It’s madness, and it’s maddening.