A mere 50 pages in and I can already tell that Inventing the Renaissance will be a banger of a book. Three concepts in particular stood out for there relevance far outside that particular period in history:

• Legitimacy, why it is important to have it and how to obtain it. Marrying into a noble family, graduating from a well-known program, surviving a few years in big pharma/big tech, getting linked to by a major website, etc.
• Zombie ideas as wrong theories that lead to more research that leads to correct theories but then refuse to die — cruthes that outlive their usefulness. See also: zombie medicine.
• Conflicting projections, as in the Medicis playing to role of “merchant scum” in Florence, a city which tends to banish people with ambitions towards nobility, while at the same time playing up your high status to the outsiders who view symbols of nobility as a sign of legitimacy (see above). It is a tough game to play which is why the AI companies are failing at it so spectacularly (to investors and eneterprise clients: we will eliminate the need for XX% of the work force; to the plebs: let us build data centers, it will create jobs; to themselves: why do they hate us?)

No surprise that it has been nominated for a Best Related Work Hugo Award, and kudos to Palmer for compelling me to write the first “currently reading” post in almost two years (the last one was also for a book she wrote).

🕹️ Good write up in today’s FT about Esoteric Ebb, a fantasy RPG which seems to be heavily influenced by Planescape: Tornment, Disco Elysium and Terry Pratchet’s Discworld. Sign me up! Mentioned at the end is Type Help, a free-to-play text adventure that is quite unlike any work of interactive fiction I’ve seen before. Recommended.

• Subscription Cost Visualizer ⊕ [Note: ᔥSwiss Miss ] , a nifty online tool that is like DaisyDisk for your subscriptions. Wish I had it before the purge for a before and after.
• Joan Westenberg: Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decay. The only nit I have to pick with this marvelous essay is that Westenberg mentions Nate Silver, he of old 538, as “one of the more honest figures here” without mentioning his clear conflict of interest.
• David Cain on Raptitude: Count Your Blessings, but Count Carefully. A nice reframing of the human condition, which I will add to my list of mental models.
• Peco Gaskovski: Measuring out my life in coffee spoons. The me with and without coffee are indeed a different person, and anyone with whom I’ve crossed paths owes some gratitude to the Ottomans for bringing it to Europe.
• Daniel Franks: on Yi Yi, my favourite movie and why I think everyone must watch it. I am yet to see it, but it is on the list!

Tax Day was a good kick in the rear to clean up all the recurring payments that have accumulated over the years. Here are a few notable cancellations:

• Netflix, which I tend to picked on even as I commend its better offerings. Turd to diamond ratio is still too high, and with the most recent price increase it is not worth it any more.
• Paramount+, because there are better things to do in one’s life than watch Star Trek reruns.
• Disney+ would have been a cancellation as we rarely ever watch it. But for some reason we have been grandfathered into the Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ 4K plan for $80 per annum and at that price it is worth it to have Gravity Falls available at a moment’s notice.
• All iOS weather apps, because my weather-related needs just aren’t that sophisticated and the default app serves them fine, thank you very much.
• Hookmark, previously known as Hook, a MacOS productivity app that (1) pissed me off by brandishing the tag line “Buy Once, Own Forever” even as it kills you with notifications that the new version 3.2.1.3.2.5 is out and you need to pay $30 for an “Updates license” all while (2) I am trying to move away from MacOS anyway. Yes, technically this is not a subscription that needs canceling but the toughest attachments to part with are those that exist only in my mind (see also: Tinderbox, DEVONthink, OmniFocus, MailMate, etc.)
• Epsilon Theory, a more esoteric platform which never quite recaptured the time they first grabbed my attention.

So with all of that deadweight removed, I felt that I could splurge on a Digital+Print subscription to Nautilus, an even more lay audience-friendly version of Quanta Magazine. Both of those are, of course, wildflowers growing out of the compost pile that was Scientific American. Thus Nautilus joins the Financial Times as the only print editions we subscribe to, all other magazines that come in the mail being hoisted on us as members of various medical societies.

• Bayesian Workflow, a new book from Andrew Gelman et al, coming out in June. Here is Gelman’s announcement and here is the book’s web page.
• The Alba Madonna, ⊕ [Note: ᔥ Tyler Cowen ] a painting of Raphael’s at the National Gallery of Art, which you can examine in detail on their website.
• The Classical Station, ⊕ [Note: ᔥ William Parker ] a no-nonsense, no-tracking stream of human-selected music. Here is their daily playlist.
• just the fracking QR code, ⊕ [Note: ᔥ Jahir Fiquitiva on Mastodon ] a no-nonsense, no tracking website that will give you the QR image for any text, file or hex code you desire.
• Jellyfin, a home media server which resembles Plex before it was enshittified. Note that (1) I am yet to try it out and (2) the person whom I first saw mention it does not in fact endorse it.

Having switched to Linux for 90% of my computing, I realized Emacs could cover much of those 90%:

• mu4e for email
• org-mode for project management
• Denote for slipbox-styled notes [Note: I have followed the Zettelkasten blog since its early days but have somehow missed out that they were big proponents of Emacs. Here is a talk Christian Tietez of the Zettelkasten blog had at EmacsConf 2025, which is how I learned about Denote. ]
• A custom micro.blog client, Microbe, for blog post management
• A custom Inkwell client, Inkling, for reading RSS feeds

And for all my kvetching about how ugly Emacs can be, this was in fact a me problem and not an Emacs problem. It took 8 lines of code and downloading some decent fonts for things to look much better.

Microsoft’s Windows Office Copilot web apps cover almost everything else. Alas, not absolutely everything:

• Having used DEVONthink for document management I am reluctant to go back to the naked file system. Still, in the last few years I had been using DEVONthink’s advanced capabilities less and less to the point that its main purpose was as a security blanket.
• My data analysis journey went from R to Python (or rather iPython/Jupyter) to Mathematica. There are many reasons why Mathematica is no longer a good fit so now I have to decide how many steps back I should take — to Python or R.
• Podcast recording and editing is a tiny issue in the grand scheme — there is but a single podcast in Serbian that I am in care of — but I would rather not have to reinvent the workflow I have down pat in Logic Pro that gets me from raw mp3 to the final upload in 15 minutes or less.

Which is to say, expect a few more of these updates on the software side. Hardware will have to wait.

Cory Doctorow wrote this morning about a short-lived business venture of his from the late 1990s that, during a brainstorming session, invented SEO slop years before either of those two terms became widely known. That train of thought didn’t go anywhere — they weren’t sociopaths — but it made him realize an important life fact:

The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn’t their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks.

Apple is another clear example. The book Apple in China opened my eyes to the ruthlessness with which their operations team worked throughout the company’s history. Small wonder then that elevating their Chief Operating Officer to the CEO role would lead company valuation to skyrocket and its culture to decay so much that it got an introverted nerd to write an open letter to the presumptive CEO futurus.

And of course we have the modern-day King of the Sociopaths in Sam Altman. I have decided not to read anything that is longer than 10,000 words this week unless written by Philip K. Dick so I did not delve into The New Yorker account of Altman’s adventures in bullshitting, but John Gruber has helpfully provided some excerpts. Behold a quote from an OpenAI board member:

“He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

Point number one is on display at any of his interviews. One of the last episodes of Conversations with Tyler I listened to was with Sam Altman and the extent to which he reflexively and without thinking agreed with every possible hypothesis and conjecture Cowen put out was comical. Point number two makes him exceedingly dangerous. That so many luminaries of big tech are willing to hold hands with the man and continue doing business with him is Wittgenstein’s ruler of Silicon Valley sociopathy.

The problem isn’t that sociopaths exist — they always have — but that the casinofication of the American economy has created outsized rewards for those particular personality traits while pushing away people with stronger ties to reality. Once a field attracts a critical mass of sociopaths ⊕ [Note: What should be the collective term for a group of sociopaths? You know, like “a conspiracy of ravens” or “a murmuration of starlings”. Once comes to mind immediately but I will leave figuring out which as an exercise for the reader. ] the minority rule kicks in. Soon enough, everyone must exhibit sociopath-like behavior just to stay in the game. Like Venkatesh Rao recently wrote: “I’m a good person, but everyone is out to get me, so I’d better try to get them first. I’m still a good person.”

Those who don’t adapt, retreat. Sometimes, if we are lucky, they even write about it. And there we have a paradox, in that the same technology supercharging sociopaths in their quest for bullshittification is enabling more and more people to retreat to a life of quiet content. For now.

• Matt Novak on Bluesky: “Let’s talk about tonight…”. Behold the banality of evil.
• Scott Sumner: The odd disappearance of the business cycle. In which an economist wonders why everyone is so down on the economy when the numbers tell us that we live in financial nirvana. Well I can think of a few reasons thanks to Kyla Scanlon’s newsletter. Her “Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy” from December 2025 addresses Sumner’s confusion head on.
• Joan Westenberg: Why I quit “The Strive”. Westenberg doesn’t call it that, but she describes the founder trap — a funhouse mirror version of the upper middle class trap. Indeed, her article fits neatly into Wednesday’s congames.
• Adam Ruben for Science: Cite unseen: when AI hallucinates scientific articles. The preeminent scientific journal discovers hallucinations. The moral is that those who ask Kenneth the page to write their dissertation deserve everything they get.
• Bonus: Little Snitch for Linux. An OG MacOS app now has a proper Linux version. May it be a sign of things to come.

• Venkatesh Rao: On Cooling America Out. Rao is back and in rare form, expanding on a 1952 paper about conmen and their victims. In the process, he describes a leg of the American elephant not often discussed:

The US is something of a clueless striver culture of idealistic innocents who believe themselves to be worldly and cunning, based on a bewildering stack of ludicrous mythologies ranging from the personal-scale “American Dream” to the various eras of American Exceptionalism. This is true even of the macho idealism of the right.

It is also a culture of people who seem systematically disposed to the suspicion that they are being conned by someone in everything they do, and are primed to try and con others pre-emptively before they get conned. And do so while maintaining an image of their own righteousness. Trust, but verify, is the nice way of putting it. A more accurate way might be: I’m a good person, but everyone is out to get me, so I’d better try to get them first. I’m still a good person.

Because, of course, only the paranoid survive.

• Ian Betteridge: The worst of us. Betteridge starts with a note on the wonderfully-named Claude Mythos but soon jumps over to my favorite short story. I won’t spoil the ending.
• Nick Maggiulli: The Upper Middle Class Trap. Maggiulli tries to explain some recent observations. His conclusion is similar to Rao’s: the con is nearing its end. Get out if you still can.
• Terry Godier: Body Language. What Godier is doing isn’t blogging. It’s performance art.

Goodbye, Feedly. Now that Inkwell has soft-launched OPML sync ⊕ [Note: If you are a Premium user of micro.blog, go to the Account page and click the “OPML Sync…” button in the Feed subscriptions section. It asks for the URL of the OPML file you would like to sync with, though from my experiments “Sync” is a bit of a misnomer as it will only add the RSS feeds it finds there that you don’t yet have on Inkwell but it doesn’t remove the ones that are on Inkwell but not in the syncing OPML. ] I can go back to FeedLand as my source of RSS feed subscription truth. This also means that my blogroll is due for a makeover. Would it not be much better if I could show the most recent posts for each recommended feed, FeedLand-style?

The second update is to Hugo, micro.blog’s static website generator of choice, which is now version 0.158, from 0.91. [Note: Hugo versioning is absolutely idiotic so you can’t tell, but this is a 60-version jump. ] The tradeoff for the noticeably quicker site generation — from around 2 minutes to <1 minute, important for someone who keeps finding typos in all of their posts — was time spent whack-a-mole-ing errors until I came to just a single WARNING which will hopefully not snowball into anything more serious.

The biggest errors, and the reason why initially the blog wouldn’t render at all, was that a bunch of functions were replaced by different, similarly sounding functions, made for reasons unknown. Petty stuff like .Site.Authors is now .Site.Params.authors, or .Page.Hugo is now hugo.Generator. Things that in the background may have been a life-and-death battle between warring Hugo factions (originalists versus those deathly afraid of technical debt? free spirits versus pedants?) but whose result is mere end-user annoyance. These were a simple Find and Replace away.

Second-order issues came from plugins that have not yet been updated. So in addition to Feedly I have also said my goodbyes to the Stats section of this blog, and to various rarely used functions — how often do people share this stuff on Facebook anyway, and does Facebook still have those web cards for each site?

The last is a warning that the term taxonomyterm has been deprecated and that, per Gemini, I should and I kid you not change taxonomyTerm to taxonomy and the old taxonomy to term. I thought I did this everywhere, but apparently not as I still get that warning each time I post something. But that I can live with.