Miloš Miljković

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 13:43:00 -0500

Related to my previous post: 27 reading tips from Nassim Taleb. My favorites:

A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.

Books are not read by the majority because they read the Internet, which is like junk food for the mind.

The unread books on your shelf are like a universe of alternate possibilities waiting to be explored.

A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it.

And here is his favorite.

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 07:10:12 -0500

I remember how many years later, in a bookstore in Georgetown, in Washington, I saw for the first time a person buying books by piling them in a cart the way one buys potatoes or bananas in a supermarket. That struck me as entirely disrespectful of writers. I would not like my books to be bought in such a way

This is from Branko Milanović’s most recent post. It looks like he doesn’t believe in the antilibrary.

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 19:08:10 -0500

The American feedback-industrial complex is getting out of hand. “Overall, how satisfied were you with your recent ATM experience?” asked an email I received today. Really, Bank of America?

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 07:55:40 -0500

Trying out Readwise this week. I am still undecided, though leaning towards “not for me” and for the reason why look no further than their video explaining how to use RSS: I am about 20 years too old to appreciate the style, and the anachronisms are infuriating.

📺 True Detective: Night Country

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:47:26 -0500

📺 True Detective: Night Country comes 10 years after the first season, if you can believe it has been that long. It is a different show for a different time now: the atmosphere of confusion, uncertainty and dread from the original is still there, but so many other things are different that it is a bit of a stretch to have them share the True Detective title. A few spoiler-ish observations:

Like the original, there is an actual real-world solution to the murder mystery. Unlike the original, which had a slight layer of the supernatural added on top, Night Country has supernatural tendencies up top, down below, and everywhere in between but somehow leaves out any of the Lovecraftian horror that would have been perfect for the setting. Oh well.
Night Country had too much vagueness in some key aspects for me to be fully immersed: What kind of pollution, exactly, is threatening the town that is able to cause so much misery but also… speeds up thawing of the permafrost? And how could those substances, whatever they are, possibly speed up studying bacteria?
Jodie Foster and Kali Reis are as good of a couple as McConaughey and Harrelson were in Season 1, if not better, but True Detective is not only about dysfunctional cops partnering up in barely inhabitable locations.
When I saw that the season was set in Alaska I was hoping for some more callback to H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, At the Mountains of Madness was set at the other pole, but dark horrors lurking deep beneath the ice would have fit perfectly with the season’s premise. Alas, nonsensical mentions of time being “a flat circle” and people “asking the wrong question” were the only artifacts brought back from 2014.
The intro sequence was the only time I tolerated a Billie Eilish song.

If nothing else it made us start watching Season 3, which we hadn’t noticed at all when it came out in 2017. It looks promising!

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 09:22:41 -0500

A proper paella, with a thin layer of short grain rice. Seafood instead of the original Valenciana since I’m not a fan of snails, but I’ll have to try it next time.

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 18:12:59 -0500

Finished reading: Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer 📚 and it is like nothing I have read before. I wish that was only because of the premise: that a 25th century character would write for a 26th century audience in the style of the 18th century — quite convenient when the author’s day job is being a historian of the Enlightment. Or just because of the gratuitous and at times bizzare sex, more than in anything I’ve read before — which, fine, nothing new under the Sun (king). But there is also, splattered across the pages, more gore, dismemberment and canibalism than I have ever — please, please, please excuse the pun — digested, and I am all for expanding boundaries but really, Dr. Palmer? The interest in censorship suddenly comes under a different light.

Still, it is an important story well told and I will grudgingly read the second book in the series.

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 10:11:41 -0500

📚 Speaking of Ada Palmer, I am reading Too Like the Lightning and two-thirds through my feelings on the book and its protagonists are alternating between hooked and horrified. If I had to wager I would say that hooked will prevail, but then I’m not a gambler.

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 10:07:20 -0500

R.F. Kuang, Neil Gaiman and many other great writers weren’t nominated for last year’s Hugo awards because the award administrators flagged their works as potentially “sensitive” to China.

As Ada Palmer wrote, most censorship has always been self-censorship, even in what we think of as the darkest days of the inquisition. Good thing her own Sci-Fi series was nominated one year earlier, in 2022.

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 05:28:33 -0500

The DC Mayor is not looking good at all this week. Writing about the crime in DC, I may have hinted, several times, that it’s the District Council’s bad lawmaking which led to the great crime wave of 2023. Well, a pseudononymous but (a bit too) well-informed Substack writer has recently outlined why that just isn’t so: most of the responsibility falls on the executive branch, that is to say the Mayor and her office. Ineffective council members are but convenient scape goats. Go figure.

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 11:20:05 +0100

The Washington Post has a history of the Wizards' plan to move to Virginia, and no one looks good: the Wizards' owner Ted Leonsis is a billionaire whose feelings got hurt for not getting a fruit basket from the city, DC mayor Muriel Bowser and her office are slow on the uptake, loosing two birds in hand (the Wizards and the Caps) for one in the bush (the Commanders), DC council is values street busker’s “freedom of expression” to play music over an amplifier in the wee hours over noise complaints of businesses and residents. Only the Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin would seem to know what he was doing, but that is only because the article left out some major deficiencies of the proposed new site and of course without his pushing of the project none of this would have happened.

And all that drama for the second-worst team in the NBA this season. Sad.

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 02:38:05 -0500

Flaneuring in Valencia. It’s my first time back in Europe in 7 years and as much as I like DC, living there kind of made me forget what a proper city can look like.

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 11:52:31 +0100

📺 Silo, Season 1 is the first show I finished watching on AVP and all I could think about after the last episode was how very appropriate that Apple would be the one producing it — I’ll write no more lest I spoil it. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Fallout 3.

There is at least one good reason to use AVP in public; alas, even I am too self-conscious to do it

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:48:44 +0100

I am attending a medical conference in Valencia, Spain this week — more thoughts on being back in Europe after 7 years coming up — and all I could think about while sitting in the auditorium, looking at slides and listening to the speakers was that these kinds of events would be the perfect use case for AVP.

The congress center in Valencia is top-notch, with comfortable seats and plenty of leg room. Even so, laptops are unwieldy, especially if you need to balance one while holding a coffee cup in one hand and a phone for taking photos of the slides in the other. This is even harder when you are crammed against the seat in front of you, which is the more common situation for large conferences. And if you use the laptop for anything other than touch typing — say, pulling up a paper that was just mentioned while it was still fresh in your memory — you will have to be focused on the screen and nine times out of ten an important slide will pass you by without your noticing or, even worse, noticing and pulling out the phone quickly only for the slide to change just as you were about to snap a photo.

So imagine if there was a device that could let you take photos, write notes, and do some web browsing all while still paying attention to what matters, the talk itself. If a friend and colleague was the one on the stage you could even take an immersive video. And before you say that the virtual keyboard is useless, Apple’s Magic Keyboard is lighter than an abstract book, more durable than a laptop if and when dropped, and works beautifully with AVP.

If I were one of 30,000 attendees in a large conference, say ASCO or ASH annual meetings, I wouldn’t even mind trying this out. Alas, this one is on the small side, with a few hundred people sharing the same room and hallways, and the embarrassment factor was just too much for me to pull it off. But I thought about it, and I’m hoping to try it out by the end of the year, shame be damned.

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:22:43 +0100

Finished reading: I and Thou by Martin Buber 📚 and there is a message there, hidden under miles-deep layers of impenetrable German that no translator can bypass. Whether it is any more complicated than “don’t treat people like things” — I couldn’t say.

To Buber’s credit, he himself said that the book was untranslatable. Without knowing what the original was like, I tend to agree.

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 09:10:16 +0100

I have forgotten how absolutely terrible and hostile Frankfurt airport was. Not to me personally this morning, but I cannot imagine my parents navigating the maze of terminals, bus routes, underground passages and security checkpoints. Avoid at all cost.

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 16:41:14 +0100

🍿 If you want me to see a movie, write a review like this. It’s for Perfect Days by Wim Wenders, and it made a 2-hour movie about a toilet cleaner in Tokyo look absolutely marvelous.

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 14:01:05 +0100

Matt Brichler’s view of AVP matches my own. For example:

… you may wear the headset at your desk, but you aren’t going to wander around the office with it on. And as we now know from using the headset, we know this wouldn’t even be useful since all your windows would be back at your desk so you’d be wearing the headset for no reason at all in the break room.

Even at the desk, AVP is not something I’d wear all the time. Just yesterday I was trying out the headset at work, in a tiny conference room I booked just for the purpose. A coworker came in to ask a question and I reflexively took it off — it just felt like good manners. To Apple’s credit, putting it back on is so seamless and window placement so stable that I didn’t groan internally for having to replace it.

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 13:52:58 +0100

It was a wet and cold Chinese/Lunar New Year parade yesterday, but great fun nevertheless. Happy New Year to those who celebrate!

Apple Vision Pro and productivity, one week in

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 15:18:39 +0100

AVP’s use as a personal entertainment device in unquestionable, and I look forward to catching up on many movies, TV shows and PS5 games in which no one else in the family has shown any interest. That alone is sufficient reason not to return it.

But why I bought it in the first place was to do work while traveling, and even though there are signigificant and valid concerns about its use as a “productivity device” — the quotes are there because I have developed an aversion to productivity as a concept — I think I will be able to deal with the many tradeoffs, some of which are:

The screens. As high-resolution as they are, they are dimmer then my 5K LG UltraFine and their simulated 4K virtual Mac display Henceforth VMD, because “VD” has other connotations. is just not as sharp. Marco Arment’s observation in the most recent episode of ATP was spot on: to be usable, the resolution should be one notch lower than the default 2560x1440, which significantly decreases the usable space, at least until dual VMDs become supported. Still, it is higher than the default resolution of my 13" MacBook Air and AVP native apps floating on the side can relieve some of the screen real estate. I will see how this pans out the next time I’m back on the plane — as early as next week.

The input. When using the VMD in an environment — Mt. Hood has been my preferred place of work — the keyboard tends to be occluded and blurry, and the display floats slightly higher than the physical screen. This is suboptimal, even if you are a very good touch typist (I am merely adequate). Dictation will be my friend moving forward, but the devil is in the editing: AVP is marginally worse at it when using the VMD and insurmountably worse in the native apps.

Fantastical is a good example: the native AVP app is wonderfully done, and I’d rather have it floating on the side of the VMD while focusing on actual work. Alas, entering a new meeting using the native app has been painful and each time I defaulted back to MacOS. Considering Fantastical’s origin as an applet for entering appointments using natural language, this is kind of sad. Should I not be able to tell it what to do with my appointments and have it rearrange them? I hope the AVP market is large enough for Flexibits to consider replacing the “+” icon with a microphone, and have voice be the main input method in realityOS.

The apps. Or lack thereof. This, I hope, will solve itself over time, because having OmniFocus float off on the side would save much VMD space. But here again is a conundrum: the floating window would be OK for checking off tasks, but I still rely on too many Omni automations and Keyboard Maestro shortcuts to ever fully switch to the native app. Again, having better voice input would help.

The native apps themselves have so far — slight differences in design aside — been like having several iPad minis float in front of you. And for what it is, it works. So it seems that Apple has finally found the right way to multitask in iPad OS; too bad it can’t be done on the iPad itself.

The comfort. I have a strong suspicion my face scan when ordering got the shield size wrong, and there is at least one person who’s had the similar experience of too much pressure on the cheekbones that was relieved when he redid the scan and tried on an adequate mask at the store. The same video mentions an essential part of fitting that I haven’t been doing: realigning the displays each time I fiddled with the dual bands and the AVP position on my face. Proper alignment made the high-resolution VMD much less blurry; the difference in the chunky native apps was not an obvious, though I suspect it would decrease motion sickness if there was any before.

The portability. That $200 case is just too big. It would take up the entire space of my backpack, and I don’t even carry my backpack when traveling for business. So, some rethinking is in order in how I pack everything which is one of those infrastructure things I’d rather not have to deal with, but from limited home use of AVP it seems like it will be worth it.

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 14:31:33 +0100

🍿 Orion and the Dark (2024) is Charlie Kaufman’s go at writing for children, and he did a marvelous job. Early on it declares itself as a literal bedtime story, and thus follows the logic of every improvised bedtime story ever told, from Alice in Wonderland to whatever tall tale you told your own kids most recently. So it runs on feeling more than on plot, but then which Kaufman movie didn’t? A David Foster Wallace mention and a Werner Herzog cameo are cherries on top.

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 20:48:04 +0100

Whisper on the Mac and iOS devices is stunningly good for both English and Serbian transcription. I use superwhisper on the Mac because its more extensive support for different prompts, but Aiko is more affordable, available for both macOS and iOS, and works brilliantly on Apple Vision Pro.

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 20:27:30 +0100

Not two weeks have gone by since my lament on infrequent posting and lo, there is a new — short! — article from Applied Divinity Studies: On the Experience of Using a Guest Pass at an Elite Gym. I’m not sure it is about an actual gym experience, but the lesson is broadly applicable.

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 15:38:52 +0100

Alex Tabarrok gives name to something we’ve all experienced:

Ironically, just as measles can induce immunological amnesia, vaccines can induce social amnesia about the severity of diseases, thereby making society more susceptible to pathogens that they previously were able to resist.

“Vaccine-induced social amnesia” is a good way to describe it. See also: people who ex post claim we never needed covid-19 lockdowns when the truth is in fact the opposite.

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 13:29:06 +0100

🏀 By the way, Jordan Poole has confirmed last night that he was epically bad: 0 points and 6 fouls after 24 minutes in the game. The trade deadline is today — maybe the Wizards can pay someone to take him?