Infinite Regress

Thursday links, Nautilus science edition

Thu, 07 May 2026 11:59:16 -0400

Bob Grant: The Mysterious Hantavirus Outbreak That Put the Virus on the Western Map. European hantavirus is what you get when mice pee all over your idyllic mountain cottage. It causes your kidneys to fail and you may need dialysis until they heal, but unless you had bad kidneys to begin with there should be no permanent damage. The (wild) west hantavirus you can get from mice and humans alike, goes for your lungs instead of the kidneys, and kills 4 out of 10 humans who get it. And now there is a cruise ship full of people who were exposed. As if I needed another reason to avoid cruises like the plague.
Kristen French: What Your Dream Life Says About You. It tells me I wake up too early because I only remember them once every few weeks!
Kristen French interviews Lisa Feldman Barrett: How Does Your Brain Know a Cat Is a Cat? It is about Barrett’s Nature review which is behind the paywall but at least gives out the punchline in the title: “Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain.” Barrett’s own article in Nautilus, about emotional intelligence, is also worth a read.
Jake Currie: The Best of NASA’s Newly Released Photos From the Artemis II Mission. An excellent source of desktop and smartphone backgrounds.
Bob Grant, again: AI Music vs. My Parents. A sad state of affairs. Thankfully, personal experience tells me the younger generations are better at identifying saccharine “content” as slop and filtering it out.

Wed, 06 May 2026 17:18:42 -0400

This letter to Ted Turner from his dad on the choice of college major could be the best thing you will read today. Horribly misguided and against everything I stand for, but oh how much fun. This is how it starts:

My dear son,

I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a Major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today.

And it gets better! (ᔥNY Times Pitchbot on Bluesky)

Wed, 06 May 2026 09:37:14 -0400

I see these “Sysco” trucks all around DC, blocking driveways, hanging out in the middle lanes, making commutes and school dropoffs misreable. Lo and behold, their driving style matches their corporate mission. As if I needed another reason not to eat out.

Tuesday links, at the movies

Tue, 05 May 2026 09:00:31 -0400

Brian VanHooker for Polygon: An oral history of The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Netflix’s quirky sci-fi masterpiece. I don’t know how long an article needs to be or how many people need to be involved for it to qualify as an oral history, but this ain’t it. Still, it is about one of our family’s favorite movies so I felt obligated to link. For sampling of a true “oral history”, check out The Ringer.
Nick Schaden: Discs versus digital: A buyer’s guide. Discs, of course, which are no less digital than streaming and are impervious to flaky internet connections.
Gabby at woolgathering: one ticket for two movies, please!. Some interesting movie pairings, with the very first one proposed spanning the longest time period: Bringing Up Baby from (1938) + What’s Up, Doc? (1972).
Scott Sumner: Films of 2026: Q1. Many of them are behind the Substack paywall (why, Scott, why?) but the reviews of new-ish movies I never would have heard of otherwise is above the fold. His brief re-re-review of Mulholland Drive is spot on.

Smartphones are probably the ultimate computing device, for reasons of human physiology

Mon, 04 May 2026 14:35:28 -0400

In the most recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber and MG Siegler agreed that the smartphone will be difficult to overthrow as the dominant method of computing. Something unthinkable would need to happen for us to leave the phones at home in favor of watches, earbuds or pendants, Her-style. So, even if SoC and batteries improve to such extent that we could fit the 2040s equivalent of an M5 chip into a MacBook, iPhone and AirPods equally, and all with great battery life, people would still reach out for their phones first.

This wasn’t the first time I heard the thesis, and it always sounded about right. I don’t know about everyone else, but I tend to be impatient when chatting with Siri. This isn’t about its “lack of” intelligence: although I had only used ChatGPT’s voice chats as a novelty when demoing it to elderly family members, even they needed a few more seconds to answer specific questions than my patience would allow. So why is that?

Well, my impatience would suggest that bandwidth is key, more specifically our own bandwidth to process information. Humans are visual creatures: much of our own brain’s neural pathways are tied up in receiving and processing information from the 6 million cones and 120 million rods contained in the approximately 2,200 square millimeters of our retinas. The next sense down in the number of receptors is not even close: touch, with about 4 million somatosensory receptors packed in the average 1.79 square meters — or 1.79 million square millimeters — of body surface area. That is two orders of magnitude more sensors packed into three orders of magnitude less space in retina (sight) versus skin (touch). What about sound, which is competing with sight as the interface of record? There are around 15,500 hair cells in each cochlea for 31,000 total — not even close. ⊕ [Note: This is why writing has been the defining achievement of our species, condensing the ineffable into something we can quickly process, and why I will never get tired of reading histories of notebooks and paper. ] But you don’t need to know any of this to have experienced dreams. When was the last time you remembered a particularly nightmarish smell or sound when you were asleep?

So if the optimal way for computers to communicate with us is via retinal inputs, does it not make the most sense to attach most of the local computing machinery onto the interface?

But what about our outputs? Unless you were born on Krypton one wouldn’t expect anything shooting out of your retinas to interact with the environment. Well, here is my main uncertainty in the smartphone-as-the-ultimate-device hypothesis: could you not, on an infinite timescale, wear contact lenses that could beam in information to you as efficiently as possible? Are the Apple Vision Pro and whatever creepiness Meta is out with now not steps towards our corneal computing future? Perhaps, but perhaps not, and the interaction with whatever is beamed into our eyes will be the next limiting factor.

All our movements are planned in the prefrontal cortex and executed in the precentral gyrus of the frontal cortex. A lot of that surface area is dedicated to our hands, as the creepy but to the best of our knowledge accurate cortical motor homunculus shows. ⊕ [Note: Fun fact about the brain: it’s plastic. In that, it can and does get rearranged as circumstances warrant, and the extent of the rearrangement can be drastic. But receptor numbers are what they are, so any broad changes to the general population would have to take… millennia? Dozens of millennia? Certainly longer than the life span — not to mention attention span — of the average S&P 500 company. ] The side by side representations of the sensory and motor homunculi twins is particularly striking in showing how important our hands are to our sense of self. Now, another prominent feature they have are large tongues and lips, much of it in the service of producing sound, so it is not a surprise that voice controls exist, and not just for the times when our hands are otherwise occupied. Yet what the homunculi show and what any cat parent will attest is that humans are, to the outside world, mostly a pair of hands attached to some rather bizarre squishy elements. Hey, we may as well own it!

The most serious consequence of this state of affairs, much to my disappointment, is that smartphones as we know them are here to stay so there isn’t much point in hobbling my own computing experience with black and white displays, “feature” phones and the like. While I would have loved, in my project to ditch Apple, not to replace my iPhone with anything else “smart”, reason says to try and find a true alternative. GrapheneOS looks promising, and by the time my current phone kicks the can or passes on something else may come along. Here’s hoping.

Springtime in Washington

Sun, 03 May 2026 16:10:43 -0400

We have recently bought a book full of photo prints of 19th century Washington DC. The city was founded in 1800 and was a bit of a backwater all the way until the Civil War and massive expansion of the federal government. “There was a time”, notes the introduction, “when cows grazed within sight of the Capitol.”

The farmers are out, but the city is still closer to its rural origins than a visitor — particularly someone from the thoroughly deforested and dewilded Western Europe — could imagine. Theodore Roosevelt Island is about a mile from the White House as the crow flies, and even closer to some other well-known monuments. ⊕ [Note: The island is the memorial to Teddy Roosevelt in the same vein as the more well known ones — Lincoln, Jefferson — or less directly the Kennedy Center for JFK or what the Epstein File Memorial Archive will be for DJT. But no one goes there to see the somewhat uncanny and Bioshock Infinity-like statue of Teddy; you go there for the nature. So, I would call it a success! ] We went there yesterday for an easy hike and some birdwatching.

⊕ Not a scene from 'The Last of Us'.

That white building barely visible from behind the rich leafy branches across the open sewage canal sometimes called the Potomac river is the ~~Donald J. Trump &~~ John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, but could just as easily have passed as a photo from a post-apocalyptic capital city. I took the photo yesterday, and the 3-year-old iPhone camera doesn’t do justice to those greens which brought to mind Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the chapter on nature’s fecundity.

⊕ The grass is greener on the other side of the Potomac.

No cows on our visit, but one piece of wild fauna did quite literally cross our path.

⊕ Don't know if he or she is a Mr. but they do look fantastic.

Never mind the jab against my fellow Europeans up top, even Americans don’t know just how wild their cities can be. On our visit to Smith Island the otherwise wonderful boat tour guide thought we’d look in awe at a blue heron, which is in fact a year-round resident of downtown(ish) DC. You can see red-tailed hawks on top of traffic lights munching on rats, peregrine falcons circling playgrounds, deer walking down the street around Rock Creek Park and, further uptown, a whole bunch of bunny rabbits instead of the daytime/nighttime procession of squirrels and rats as downtown rodent representatives.

Best of all, with temperatures below 18°C — that’s 65°F for Americans — all week long, a magnificent thing happened. There. Were. No. Mosquitos. In the middle of the Potomac marshland. Truly incredible.

Spring 2026 in Washington DC: so far so good.

Sat, 02 May 2026 09:43:20 -0400

As promised, today’s update to Microbe — a micro.blog client for Emacs now at version 2.0 — includes draft syncing. There were also some minor updates to Inkling. Both are available on GitHub though I think I’ll just drop that and just host them here. Something to think about for next week…

Friday links, science-y

Fri, 01 May 2026 12:11:01 -0400

Virginia Postrel for Works in Progress: Engineering the disposable diaper. I, for one, am grateful that there is no more need for “the knife method” of diaper washing — one guess as to what the knife was used for. The article doesn’t mention that the technology which made baby diapers ever so thinner and easier to transport has also helped microscopy. Knowledge begets knowledge.
Dynomight (pseud): You’re probably taking the wrong painkiller. On the benefits of acetaminophen, the blind alley of pain medicines.
Brennan Kenneth Brown: Video Games that Secretly Teach Mathematics. Just a few week ago my wife and I were talking about the mind-bending difference in magnitude between a googol and a googolplex, and the notations described in this article would have come in handy. More to the point, even farming games not mentioned here like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing do wonders to teach children math.
Ted Gioia: Socrates vs. the Venture Capitalists. Look, when FT’s Janan Ganesh praised the unexamined life I don’t think he meant going about it like an amoeba. Est modus in rebus.
Jake Currie for Nautilus: Birds Are More Afraid of Women Than of Men. Submitted without further comment.

Fri, 01 May 2026 11:11:40 -0400

Well, folks, I did it: I have hit FeedLand’s feed creation limit. Any chance this can be increased, @dave? I’ve just discovered a new blog I’d like to add.

"Notes on science and scientism" by Protesilaos

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:17:31 -0400

The essay is five years old yet I have discovered it just now because the author is also the person behind Denote, a marvelous note-taking tool for Emacs. The tone is not as dry as a scholastic text ⊕ [Note: For a Substack version of a similar message I encourage you to check out Experimental History. The most recent post, for example, is a case study of one particular aspect of scientism — zombie ideas. ] but not as entertaining as something one would find on Substack. The message is unambiguous, and rather than rehash it let me quote one paragraph out of many:

Science as a career choice rather than a disposition towards learning, and an attitude of living in accordance with the principles than (sic!) enable such learning, contributes to the distancing from philosophy and to the degradation of the moral character of those involved. The practitioner who has not been in the least exposed to the rigours of a virtuous modus vivendi is likely to prioritise superficialities that obscure their own intellectual insecurities, such as social status, a growing collection of titles and certificates that are supposed to support one’s appeal to intellectuality, or the emptiness of being celebrated as a force for so-called “progress” and “rationality” among those who are believed to be unfortunate enough not to be scientists. The latter is one of those non-scientific beliefs amplified by the oligopoly of mass media that helps the philosophically deprived science stake its claim as the tutelary figure of the contemporary world, while blithely disregarding its instrumentalisation as both the apologist and militant activist of the power apparatus that enables it.

The author, who chose to drop his surname and go just by Protesilaos thereby making me break the house rule of using last names only when referring to folks, lives in a hut he built himself ⊕ [Note: A hut which brought to mind this recent essay from Joan Westenberg about people retreating from their true calling for years in order to recharge. ] in the mountains of Cyprus. Fascinating stuff, all with a large back catalogue I will be perusing in the months to come.

The last few years have been particularly tricky to tread for people who recognize the difference between science and scientism. If the entire board of the National Science Foundation is fired in one day, is it an attack on science or an attempt to curb scientism? [Note: ¿Por qué no los dos? ] When one of the “Abundance” guys — yes, that book is still on the pile — proposes an unbaked not-even-embryonic scheme for reform, is the rebuke from a seasoned scientist legitimate or just circling the wagons? [Note: Vide supra ] So yes, a retreat to the mountains does sound appealing.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:42:26 -0400

Topic of the essay aside — and it’s a good one — NYT editors didn’t use to let this kind of grammatical malfeasance fly.

☕ A 3,500-word article on the physics of coffee making is just what I needed today

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:42:21 -0400

Thank you, Hacker News, for promoting — if only briefly — this marvel of an article from Physics World (or is it physicsworld?) about the more scientific aspects of the final and most important step of making coffee. Funnily enough, it focused on the two methods I’ve settled on after a couple of decades of tinkering: espresso and pour-over.

Refreshingly, it is not a “well-actually” article that would use theoretical physics and/or laboratory experiments to prove coffee experts wrong. In fact, much e-ink is spent confirming practices that baristas have settled on, including the coffee-to-water ratio, steeping time, pressure used. There were, however, two things that could make me change how I’m doing things.

For espresso, theory says that using less coffee with a coarser grind would — to me, paradoxically — result in equal extraction and coffee tasting the same despite not using as many beans. With the price of coffee rising, this could be a big deal so I will check it out. Although, to me the benefit of a proper espresso is that it allows you to get a tasty liquid out of sub-par solids, so I would never go with the most expensive beans to begin with (ahem). No, the $2/oz bag is reserved for the queen of brewing, which is the pour-over.

And for the pour-over, there is but a single thing I should change: the height from which I pour, which should apparently be far higher than I’m doing now. A pretty diagram shows the reasons why 20cm is the right height from which the stream of hot — 96°C, thank you very much, so you’d better have a temperature-controlled kettle — water onto a coarsely ground pile of dreams. And there is no safe way to do it from that high up without a gooseneck kettle, so add that to your kettle requirements. Sadly, they don’t go into the quality of the filter and the differences between plain paper, Chemex and metal meshes. I am sure there is much physics involved.

Now before you start commenting that good ol’ Folgers in a hotel room drip machine will do for you, thank you very much, let me suggest a few decidedly unfussy methods of coffee making that are infinitely better than drip coffee out of a plastic tub:

Aeropress, which used to be the main way I made coffee but abandoned as the family and the number of coffee-drinkers in the house expanded (we are currently at three; five with grandparents visiting).
Nescafe Gold, which is probably the best instant coffee you can get and it doesn’t get any less fussy than pouring hot-ish water into a mug.
Turkish coffee, with strong preference for Mehmet Efendi which, if not in Istanbul, you can easily get online.
Boiling raw beans in DC tap water for about 30 minutes.

Okay, maybe not that last one.

Behind every human success story lies a billionaire with a heart of gold

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:08:50 -0400

I tend to avoid podcasts in the style of Joe Rogan, those that begin with a 15-minute long ad block selling mushroom supplements followed by hours of meandering conversation between two people who may or may not be under the influence. Who in the world has the time?

So for that reason I avoided the podcast of one Dwarkesh Patel even as I occasionally linked to an article of his. I filed him mentally in the same “Avoid!” bucket as Lex Fridman — probably unfairly, as no one in the world can be as big of a mental bore as Fridman — without giving his podcast a chance. Although, judging by his writing on AI, I would not have liked the tone even if I had heard it. I remember, in fact, resisting the temptation to pan some of his more outlandish texts prophesying the rise of our LLM overlords with a tone which was as matter-of-fact as it was uncaring about human culture and society. My headphones are a direct link to my brain and I did not want that kind of world view to influence it.

Well a whole bunch of people are about to get influenc’d, because the New York Times has just published a glowing profile of Patel and his podcast, framing the show as a way to “eavesdrop on the A.I. elite” while burying an important fact — the one that kept me from listening in the first place — in the fourth-to-last paragraph:

Mr. Patel doesn’t see himself as a journalist, and he will do things that news organizations’ ethics rules generally prohibit, such as signing onto an amicus brief on behalf of Anthropic in its recent lawsuit against the Department of Defense, and angel-investing in companies whose founders he has interviewed (he disclosed the stakes). He believes in a “glorious transhumanist future,” and his tone isn’t adversarial. But his admirers say that his technical fluency and extensive preparation enable him to follow up or push back on superficial answers that most interviewers would simply accept. The Jensen Huang episode became heated as Mr. Patel repeatedly challenged the world’s most valuable company’s chief executive on the national-security implications of selling chips to China. “If I do cover a topic,” Mr. Patel says. “I think my reputation would suffer a lot if I don’t ask tough questions or don’t do it in a deep way.”

Of course, praising for this kind of pushback on a transhumanist podcast is like praising the host of “The Ultimate Potato Chip Podcast” for pushing back against Frito-Lay’s most recent price hike: it goes without saying that you like junk food.

But it was not this small bit of confirmation bias which made me link to the NYT. Rather, it was the same revelation that piqued Tyler Cowen’s interest, if for a different reason. Rather than paste the whole excerpt, let me provide a (human) summary: bored during the covid pandemic, a 19-year-old Patel asks the libertarian George Mason economist Bryan Caplan to be a guest on his brand-new podcast; Caplan agrees. They continue the exchange, online and in person, while Caplan is spending months in Austin, TX at the home of his billionaire friend Steve Kuhn. ⊕ [Note: This wasn’t the only good billionaire-themed article in the NYT. For more reasons why Americans should probably do a bit more to clip their wings see the travails of one Sergey Brin and the series of hardships he endured that pushed him to the right. ] Kuhn also meets Patel and, liking the cut of his jib, offers to invest in return for equity. So do other people in the Caplan-Kuhn circle which inevitably expands all the way to your friendly neighborhood founder of Amazon. Cue NYT’s signature glazing.

Crikey. Fans of C.S. Lewis should recognize immediately the themes he raised in The Inner Ring, The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, essays and books which were most likely not on Patel’s reading list during his formative years. One can only wonder whether his belief in “the glorious transhumanist future” came before or after the Silicon Valley billionaires made landfall in his young mind.

Monday links, in concurrence

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:22:49 -0400

Cory Doctorow: The enshittification multiverse, in which Doctorow proposes a general theory of enshittification to match his initial, special theory. I enthusiastically concur.
Anonymous on the Marginal Revolution comments section: On health care price transparency. The only non-Xified content you can find on Marginal Revolution these days is in the comments, so I am glad that Cowen highlighted this minute dissection of the madness called American medical billing. Needless to say, I concur.
Reese Richardson: A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise. ⊕ [Note: ᔥAndrew Gelman, who sure loves his mile-long headlines. ] This is the author’s summary of a more detailed paper in the academic journal PNAS which points to a looming catastrophe of LLM-boosted scientific paper mills holding hands with pliant journal editors to decimate the signal-to-noise ratio of the literature. Of course I concur!
Cory Doctorow, again: Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance”. His review after actually reading the whole book, and yep.

To see what would happen to American health care if it were deregulated, why not have a look at veterinary medicine?

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 10:17:29 -0400

Last week I wrote about the scammy way in which a large hospital system, Johns Hopkins, tried to bully us into paying them money we didn’t owe. The responses to it on Mastodon after a boost from Corey Doctorow were unlike anything I have received before, at least in the English language. [Note: There was a period of about a year or two, early 2020 to late 2021, when a thing I tweeted in Serbian ended up in a tabloid. Around the same time a Serbian TV station lifted an annotated covid graph I had been updating, without attribution of course. Crazy times, may they never return. ] Who knew that American “health” “care” “system” could arouse such strong feelings.

An unexpected turn in the conversation was towards veterinary medicine and how it too is undergoing general enshittification under pressure from private equity and no regulatory barriers. Which got me thinking: could veterinary medicine serve as a proxy for what would happen to human medicine if it were to become deregulated? What would a wholly free-market medicine, a libertarian’s wet dream, look like? Now clearly I have neither the time nor the will to sink hours into this kind of research, but do you know who does?

Yes, I asked Gemini to formulate a research plan, then passed on the plan with the Deep Research toggle on to create a report titled “A Comparative Analysis of Veterinary and Human Medicine: Evaluating Deregulation Proxies in the United States Healthcare System”. The goal was to test whether veterinary medicine could serve as a proxy for deregulated human healthcare and personally I don’t think it achieved that objective — this could be just my anti-AI bias — but it did provide a few juicy quotes, such as:

Theoretical free-market economics suggests that corporate consolidation should benefit the consumer by driving down costs through supply-chain efficiencies, centralized administrative services, and immense economies of scale. The empirical data from the veterinary sector directly contradicts this theory. Instead of utilizing their massive scale to lower consumer costs, corporate consolidators have leveraged their localized monopolies to exercise extreme, unchecked pricing power.

And two paragraphs down:

Furthermore, corporate management fundamentally alters the clinical culture at the ground level. Veterinarians operating within these corporate structures report worsening working conditions, including intense pressure from non-medical corporate managers to “do more and see more patients,” meet specific monthly revenue quotas, and upsell clients on expensive and potentially unnecessary diagnostics to satisfy debt obligations. (21) To protect their market share and ensure high practitioner retention despite these conditions, these corporations frequently deploy aggressive non-compete and non-solicitation agreements, legally preventing veterinarians from opening independent practices nearby and artificially suppressing labor mobility. (21) This data definitively indicates that in a deregulated medical market, institutional capital prioritizes relentless profit extraction and margin expansion over consumer cost-savings or provider well-being.

Reference 21, to save you a click, is a letter from Elizabeth Warren to CEO and President of Mars Inc — which in addition to hocking teeth-numbing treats is also apparently a veterinary behemoth — outlining her concerns about the industry consolidation with ever more references. An actual report would have to dig down into them and find primary sources for Gemini’s claims, but even this is publishable.

And here is the conclusion:

Ultimately, the hypothesis that veterinary medicine serves as a highly accurate proxy for human medical deregulation is remarkably robust. The comprehensive data confirms that stripping away third-party mandates, emergency care obligations, and unlimited tort liabilities yields a highly efficient, point-of-care transaction model that eliminates administrative bloat, enforces total price transparency, and accelerates clinical innovation. Yet, it simultaneously exposes the harsh, unyielding realities of a pure free-market health economy. The veterinary paradigm proves definitively that while deregulation optimizes the speed of scientific advancement and the profitability of specialty providers, it structurally abandons the foundational concept of healthcare as a universal human right, replacing it entirely with a ruthless, capital-gated commodity market.

Woah there, Gemini. With such strong language I do feel obligated to declare that the original prompt was as neutral as possible. I wonder what ChatGPT, Claude or Grok would have to say on the topic, and if Grok in particular would have a different view.

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:15:05 -0400

All I can think of while reading Nilay Patel’s software brain essay, quoted and linked to all over the web, is the slight but dense Metaphors We Live By. Software databases — metaphoric file cabinets and manila folders — now themselves becoming metaphors for physical objects is truly Escherian.

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:27:15 -0400

Another weekend, another free hour to improve Inkling, the 95% Gemini-generated Emacs client for Inkwell. In addition to fixing a couple of annoying bugs — and how great is it that every RSS feed is its own unique snowflake? — I’ve added a bookmark manager for micro.blog’s bookmarks, complete with tagging. Next up: adding drafts to Microbe.

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:51:16 -0400

📚 Finished reading: Dark Gods by T. E. D. Klein, a short story collection you’d get if you transported H.P. Lovecraft from 1920s New England to 1980s New York City, then asked him to water down the weirdness and narrow the horror from Cosmic to Upper East Side. Which is to say, I wasn’t impressed.

📚 Currently reading: "Inventing the Renaissance" by Ada Palmer

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:31:30 -0400

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).

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:07:13 -0400

🕹️ 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.

Thursday links, let's put a number on it edition

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:04:11 -0400

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!

Digital spring cleaning

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:10:27 -0400

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.

Yes there has been a breakthrough in treatment of pancreatic cancer and no AI was not instrumental in its development (as far as we know)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:57:26 -0400

Apart from looking like he has just been on the losing end of a fistfight, and having occasional bouts of nausea, Ben Sasse seems to be doing as well as someone recently diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer possibly could. Both the nausea and his face peeling off are because of daraxonrasib, a new drug which targets KRAS G12 mutations which are common in many cancers but are found in most pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). As a reminder, PDAC is the one that Steve Jobs did not have, the one that has the dubious distinction of being both the most common and the most lethal cancer of the pancreas.

Well, daraxonrasib seems to be doing its job and doing it well, based on a company press release. Remember, most press releases should not count as evidence for anything. This particular one, however, is worth reading because it is (1) for a randomized controlled trial with (2) a “hard” endpoint of overall survival ⊕ [Note: OK, putting my pedant hat on, the pre-specified co-primary endpoints are progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) in the RAS G12-mutant population. What is reported in the press release is only OS in the “intent-to-treat” which is to say both G12-mutant and wild type populations, which was a secondary endpoint. A bullet point at the beginning says that all primary and key secondary endpoints were met, so why not report both? Probably because one looked better than the other, but would it not be a tad suspicious that a less targeted population did better than the more targeted one? But this is just speculation, let’s see review the actual data once they come out. ] which will (3) be presented at the ASCO annual meeting, I imagine as a plenary talk, in early June of this year. The thing to look for there will be informative censoring, in particular early censoring of frail participants — the ones more likely to die early of their disease — who were randomized to receive daraxonrasib but then withdrew due to the “manageable” toxicity of a melting face. The fact that there are no participant numbers reported at all in the release makes me suspicious, though information on the number of patients enrolled is readily available: 501. That’s a lot of patients!

The company is certainly feeling optimistic: they have already received a National Priority Voucher from the US FDA and will now submit a New Drug Application. Kudos and congrats for designing and testing a working drug without using AI, because to read both professional and lay media the past two years it is a miracle there were any drugs being discovered until Large Language Models came along.

Yes, I had to invoke AI, because it is becoming exceedingly common for people to give algorithms credit where it is not due. This is what Tyler Cowen wrote yesterday about pancreatic cancer research:

AI and the pancreatic vaccine. More testing is needed, but there is a reasonable chance that we have a good treatment for pancreatic cancer, and AI was instrumental in that. It is mRNA as well, so a double burn on the haters.

The link is to a post on X by one Rotimi Adeoye, a “contributing opinion writer @nytimes” (one guest essay as of today which is one more than I have so congratulations, I guess?) who in true X fashion superimposed a screenshot from an uncredited journal abstract over someone posting a link to an NBC news article about the updated results of a phase 1 trial of an mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer. ⊕ [Note: For those not keeping track, you are right now reading a blog post about a blog post about a retweet of a tweet about a news article based on a press release. You’re welcome. ] These were presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research but were hinted at in a press release (?) from Memorial Sloan Kettering, where the vaccine — generic name autogene cevumeran which rolls right off the tongue doesn’t it? — was being tested.

Remember how a few paragraphs above I had implied that you should ignore most press releases? Well, news on academic websites should rank even lower as no one there has to answer to the SEC. The primary study was great for what it was, a first-in-human trial with laboratory endpoints meant to test whether the participants’ immune system responded at all to the vaccine. And it seems that it did, as shown in not one but two papers in Nature published two years apart. The number of original participants, all of whom had early-stage, freshly resected and otherwise untreated PDAC upon enrollment, was 19. Three of these did not make it to the vaccine as they had progression, died, or had toxicity from adjuvant chemotherapy before being dosed. Chemotherapy? Yes, in addition to the vaccine everyone also received “adjuvant” (meaning: there to “clean up” any residual cancer after surgery) chemotherapy (FOLFIRINOX, not for the faint of heart) and immunotherapy (atezolizumab which is in comparison to the chemo a walk in the park but even that has its side effects). There was no control.

Of the 16 participants, 8 were “responders” to the vaccine as measured by some highly sophisticated laboratory tests — not that the patients would care what their blood work showed — and in 7 of those the cancer hasn’t come back for 3 years as noted in the follow-up Nature paper or for 4-6 years as noted in yesterday’s update. This compares to 2 of 8 who were “non-responders” to the vaccine.

If you don’t have your calculator handy let me do the math for you: 9 of 16 patients, or 56.25%, with newly resected PDAC who received chemotherapy, immunotherapy and the vaccine were still alive more than 3 years after treatment. You may not know this, and I didn’t until I looked it up just now as it has been a while since I have treated patients with newly diagnosed early-stage pancreatic cancer, but the median OS after (modified) FOLFIRINOX alone in a recent large, randomized Phase 3 trial was 53.5 months, with 43.2% of patients still alive 5 or more years. Did the addition of atezolizumab and the vaccine change anything? I can’t tell and neither can anyone else until there is a randomized controlled trial, which isn’t to cast shade on the investigators — kudos to them as well for a successful first-in-human study — but let’s curb our enthusiasm.

So we have some updated results from a tiny trial that didn’t really move the needle one way or another, and yet Cowen et al. feel the need to push AI into the narrative. To be clear, there is absolutely no mention of LLMs, machine learning, algorithms or artificial intelligence of any kind anywhere in the autogene cevumeran literature. Granted, it is a “personalized” vaccine, meaning that every potential participant had their tumor sequenced and up to 20 vaccine targets identified among the newly mutated proteins. I am sure there was a lot of computation involved. But not every sophisticated computer analysis is AI, let alone an LLM, so I truly don’t see how they could legitimately be brought into the conversation.

And in case you were wondering, no, the screenshotted abstract did not in fact back up Adeoye’s claim. Best as I can tell this was the paper in question, a speculative review article in an obscure journal written by a Shanghai-affiliated group of authors who had nothing to do with BioNTech whose purpose was to be a never-looked-at reference for a false claim, that “AI played a critical role in advancing the vaccine”. Anything for the clicks, am I right?

Adeoye’s behavior was regrettable but Cowen’s is detestable, especially when paired with his look-at-the-sheeple attitude towards humans. ⊕ [Note: The linked to article from Cowen is particularly wrongheaded if you realize who the Luddites really were and that the label should in fact be a positive one. ] Cory Doctorow had warned about AI companies over-promising their capabilities for a short-term gain. But they don’t really need to: there are plenty of useful fools willing to promise on their behalf, giving it credit even where there is none.

Monday links, books attached

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:49:34 -0400

Monopolized by David Dayen, which Cory Doctorow recommended in response to my account from last week of the medical billing/phone scam rabbit-duck. Doctorow wrote about the book in more detail back in 2021 and yes it is now on the pile as is everything else below.
The Credibility Crisis in Science ⊕ [Note: ↬ Joel Hamill ] by Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer, and if the subtitle “Tweakers, Fraudsters, and the Manipulation of Empirical Results” whets your appetite there is an excerpt available in Nautilus.
The Art of Manliness by Brett and Kate McKay, who have had a blog of the same name for more than a decade, so it is a true mystery why an article in The Dispatch about the “gentlemanosphere” ⊕ [Note: ↬ Reader John ] chose to highlight overtestosteroned almost-douchebags such as Scott Galloway as the anti-manosphere crusaders rather than McKay. Haha, I’m joking, of course it’s not a mystery: Galloway gets more clicks, taps, swipes or rather the preferred method of interaction is nowadays. He also has a new book out, to which I shall not link.
The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Christopher Ricks, which someone recommended on The Honest Broker Podcast, a show that combines some of my least favorite things about this decade: Substack and using the word “podcast” to describe a video of two men talking. Still, the transcript makes for good reading and the book seems something worth keeping at the bedside, at least aspirationally.

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 17:18:04 -0400

📚 Finished reading: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, so I now have no choice but to watch Blade Runner for the fourth or fifth time. I suspect that — much like with the novel — quite a few parts will “hit different” this time around.