A few good links for the weekend:

• Is progress in medicine too slow? by Ruxandra Teslo
• Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era (ᔥJohn Naughton)
• For Every Winner a Loser by John Lanchester
• Cozytech by Venkatesh Rao, alas the best parts are behind a paywall (coziness costs)

I follow most blogs via RSS and imagine everyone doing the same. This makes me forget that this very blog is an actual website that may need tending, and every time I visit (which is rarely) a thought comes to mind: I should really do something about that font … typeface … those fonts.

But I don’t want to just copy someone else, which is what I did with the current version that uses Iowan Old Style. ⊕ ChatGPT was sadly lacking in font recognition skills. When I showed it a screenshot of this website it said the font was Georgia. When asked whether it might be Iowan after all, it had this to say: Upon closer inspection, the typeface in the image does indeed have characteristics that are more aligned with Iowan Old Style rather than Georgia. Which is some master-work backtracking and a sign of an expert BS-er.Not knowing much about typefaces, I asked someone who might.

Me: What is a high-quality publicly available serif typeface highly regarded by most if not all experts?

ChatGPT-4o: One of the most highly regarded publicly available serif typefaces is “Cormorant.” This typeface is available on Google Fonts and is praised for its elegance and versatility. Designed by Christian Thalmann, Cormorant is inspired by the classic Garamond typefaces but with modern refinements that make it suitable for both print and digital use.

Cormorant is highly regarded for its high contrast, sharp serifs, and a wide range of styles and weights, making it a versatile choice for various design needs. It’s well-crafted and respected among designers for its beauty and readability.

Me: Can it be used as a body typeface? If not, is there a typeface that I can use as body typeface?

ChatGPT-4o: While Cormorant is beautiful and highly regarded, it is generally better suited for display use (e.g., headlines, titles) rather than as a body typeface. This is because of its high contrast and intricate details, which can make it harder to read at smaller sizes, particularly in large blocks of text.

For a high-quality serif typeface suitable for body text, I recommend “EB Garamond.” This typeface is also publicly available on Google Fonts and is an excellent choice for body text due to its readability, classic design, and balanced proportions. EB Garamond is a revival of the original Garamond typeface from the 16th century, known for its timeless elegance and clarity, making it an ideal choice for both print and digital use.

EB Garamond is widely praised for its legibility, even at smaller sizes, making it an excellent option for body copy in various design projects.

Me: What is a good monospace typeface equivalent to EB Garamond?

ChatGPT-4o: A good monospace typeface equivalent to EB Garamond, in terms of quality and readability, would be “IBM Plex Mono.”

IBM Plex Mono is part of the IBM Plex typeface family, which was designed with clarity, neutrality, and versatility in mind. While it’s a monospace typeface, it maintains a sense of elegance and professionalism that aligns well with the qualities of EB Garamond. It has well-balanced proportions and is highly legible, making it suitable for coding, technical documents, or any design where a monospace font is needed.

IBM Plex Mono is also publicly available on Google Fonts, making it easily accessible for a variety of projects. Its modern design and attention to detail make it a strong choice for anyone looking for a high-quality monospace font.

Why ChatGPT would be hawking Google Fonts is a question beyond my pay grade, but hey, it’s free and easily implemented, so I might as well try.

David Perell’s podcast “How I Write” underwhelmed in the beginning, but a year in he got my attention. The episode with Ben Thompson of “Stratechery” was stellar — with a guest like Ben how could it not be — but I didn’t expect to like this episode on copywriting as much as I did.

📚 Forty books that comprise the Vague Tech Canon, per Patrick Collison:

• The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
• Seeing Like a State†
• The Dream Machine
• The Sovereign Individual
• The Beginning of Infinity†
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman*
• Softwar
• Ashlee Vance’s Elon biography
• The Mythical Man-Month
• Mindstorms
• Masters of Doom
• Skunk Works
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Thinking in Systems‡
• Superintelligence
• The Whole Earth Catalog
• Zero to One
• The Hard Thing about Hard Things
• Founders at Work
• Showstopper
• Dealers of Lightning
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb
• PG’s essays
• The Rise and Fall of American Growth
• The Big Score
• Finite and Infinite Games*
• A Pattern Language*
• The Selfish Gene*
• The Lean Startup
• Marginal Revolution (if it has to be a book, Stubborn Attachments)
• Revolution in the Valley
• Uncanny Valley
• LessWrong
• Slate Star Codex(/ACT)
• The PayPal Wars
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• The Diamond Age
• What the Dormouse Said
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt†
• Titan (on Rockefeller)
• The Power Broker*
• Gödel, Escher, Bach

Linked are those I wrote about, starred are the ones I’ve read, daggered are the ones already on my pile and double-daggered are the ones that got on it thanks to this list. There is a single ‡ entry — the list had too much navel gazing for my taste. (ᔥTyler Cowen)

For the past few months I have been trying out both Tot and Bebop for quick note-taking, and Tot has a clear edge: the Mac app. The biggest loser is Drafts, which has become way too bloated for my needs. So it goes…

I saw my first Humane AI pin in the wild today, on a dapperly dressed man walking through a not so dapper part of town. It looked fine and unconspicous, too bad it doesn’t actually work.

I disagree with Gruber. While the current calls against social media echo the comic-book/rap-music/video-game scares, there is hard(ish) data on their detrimental effects in some children and adolescents. Certainly enough to justify more scrutiny.

Google’s NotebookLM now supports asking questions about more than 10 sources and is apparently making lifelogging great again. “Lifelogging” evokes misguided attempts of Mark Cuban to measure everything and the narcissistic tendencies of Stephe Wolfram to write about me me me; but then, isn’t my DEVONthink database also a life-log of sorts and wouldn’t it be great to be able to ask plain questions about the documents inside? Of course it would, and the use case is so obvious I wrote about it already.

Considering the types of documents that are there — tax returns, birth certificates and such — uploading them to a hive mind is out of the question, but Apple and Microsoft should unquestionably work on an on-device solution. Whichever Mac — laptop or desktop, I don’t care — enables this will be the one to replace my current M1 Air which is entering its fourth year soon but still going strong.

So this is the (near? let’s hope so) future I imagine: asking when the kids' last doctor’s appointment was and having the LLM confirm it through both the calendar and a saved note. Let’s say I need this information to fill out a form at a different doctor’s office, and it also asks me about their height and weight. Well, even if we don’t obsessively check our children’s biometrics and log them in a database, they are still recorded in those school forms and would be available to LLM bots.

This is, of course, a privacy nightmare. Even Apple has privacy slip-ups, and even if the data itself is kept on a personal device which also does the processing, who’s to say that the audio won’t be sent somewhere and kept on recorded for quality control? It seems like a whole new frontier has opened up where 19th century laws contorted to fit the 20th may not easily apply, but I’ll stop there before I get too political.

There may still be a use for NotebookLM, though. With the source document restriction lifted, I can at least upload publicly available documents like journal articles, book chapters and lecture slides that I also keep in DEVONthink, grouped by topic so that they are easily transposable into NotebookLM’s “notebooks”. And I will report more, as soon as there are any publicly shareable use cases to report.

(↬Dave Winer)

ChatGPT has been a godsend for custom Mathematica functions, especially simple ones that may take 10–15 minutes to write but still take me out of the Thing I’m Actually Trying to Do.

Are they the most efficient functions there are? Probably not. But they are well-written, easy to debug, and let me put small flourishes that ultimately make my life easier but that I wouldn’t bother with if I had to do everything on my own.

A recent example is Mathemathica’s built-in Tally function which takes in a list and puts out the frequency of each element (e.g. {Yes, No, Yes, Yes} in and {{Yes, 3}, {No, 1}} out). I usually deal with longer lists where percentages would also come in handy, so having percentages also listed (i.e. {Yes, 3, 25}) would be nice. I asked ChatGPT-4o, and what it gave was good enough: ⊕ This was, of course, only a part of the response. It tends to be professorial when answering code-related questions, which is very much appreciated.

TallyWithPercentages[list_] := Module[
  {tallied, total},
  tallied = Tally[list];
  total = Length[list];
  {#[[1]], {#[[2]], N[#[[2]]/total*100]}} & /@ tallied
]

It wasn’t exactly what I wanted because the output was {Yes, 3}, 25} instead of {Yes, 3, 25}, but that was easy to change with a simple intervention — Flatten the output then re-Partition it — without thinking too much about Mathemathica’s sometimes incomprehensible short-code which I forget after a few days of not needing it.

Could I have done this with a quick online search? Of course! But the cognitive load of doing it this way is essentially zero, as is the chance of getting distracted by something else happening on the page.

📚 Finished reading: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt while trying to avoid confirmation bias since we are of the same mind on phones in schools and I was very much on his side during on of the most interesting and least civil Conversations with Tyler (Cowen).

The last third of the book — calls to action — was too much of a laundry list for my taste, but I was pleasantly surprised by Haidt’s take on spirituality with which he concluded the middle section.

Apparently, this book was supposed to be only the first chapter of Haidt’s next one, about the influence of smartphones and social media on everyone’s lives. I suspect that here, too, we will agree, though I had only written about the destruction wrought upon the older generations (present company included) in Serbian.