• Derek Lowe: Life, Maybe, On Mars, Unless We Change Our Minds. You may have heard that the Mars Rover may have found evidence of microbial life in the planet’s past. If like myself you couldn’t find time to watch the 1-hour press conference, this is the most concise yet understandable explanation I could find.
• Nick Maggiulli: The Bar Only Gets Higher. On why it is becoming ever-harder to just get on with one’s life.
• Scott Sumner: Less wrong. He seems to be sad that we don’t live in a world of rational people. I am not so sure.
• Gina Trapani: Welcome to my blog. Her posts on Lifehacker are some of the first I followed via RSS at a time before even Google Reader was a thing (remember Bloglines?) Well, she is back blogging and I have started following for old times' sake.
• Andy Baio: DOOMscroll. A simple online game you should not play more than once.

Sascha Fast of the Zettelkasten blog writes, in a post titled The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything”:

Rowlands et al. wrote about the so called “digital natives” that they lack the critical and analytical thinking skills to evaluate the information they find on the internet. We need a fully developed mental map of the subject in order to derive value from the results of an internet search.

In short: You need a trained brain to actually benefit from the internet.

But not just from the internet, as the post elaborates. This applies equally or even more to LLM outputs. A great example comes from a recent post on Andrew Gelman’s blog, though not from the man himself, where a human and ChatGPT 5 both try to improve upon a statistical model in a new-to-me language called Stan. Now if you don’t know Bayesian statistics or Stan this will all look like gobbledygook and ChatGPT won’t help you understand.

LLMs are also seeping into the everything-bucket software, the one whose primary purpose is to black-hole every article and textbook you will never read or video you will ever watch. Well now it can also give you the illusion of knowledge and control because you can ask questions about the contents. This is something Casey Newton learned this year:

I can give Notion a sprawling question like “how did the Cambridge Analytica case resolve” and get a good summary of regulatory actions across several years and countries. And by default, web search is off, meaning I know that its AI systems are drawing only on the vetted journalism that I have saved into my database.

This is a dream come true. I finally have a meaningful way to sift through millions of words of article text, ask follow-up questions, and get citations that I can use in my work. Notion may yet prove to be the AI librarian that Readwise never became.

One more thing I’m trying: I mentioned above that I continue to experiment with different ways to save material that might be useful later. Recently a Reddit post turned me on to Recall, which positions itself as a “self-organizing knowledge base.” Currently available as a web and mobile app, Recall lets you save web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, podcasts, Google Docs, and other materials into a single database that it then organizes on your behalf.

To be clear, I myself have asked for something like this from my everything-bucket software of choice, DEVONthink. And it delivered! But now I am realizing, and Sacha’s post was a good reminder, that these are becoming command line-level power tools — Hole Hawgs of the mind if you will — which can and will do great damage if not used carefully. And unlike the Hole Hawg they are freely available and come with no instruction manual. Caveat utilitor.

• Hyundai-LG immigration raid sparks alarm at foreign companies in the US. The US immigration system is a horror story co-written by Lovecraft and Kafka.
• Democrats rekindle Trump’s Epstein problem with birthday note. How many mosquito nets will it take to wash off the shame?
• After six years of silence and hype, is Silksong worth the wait?. About the Hollow Knight sequel. FT’s gaming coverage is quite good.
• How Novartis got ahead on ‘incredible’ cancer breakthrough. Their medicine coverage, on the other hand… I should write more about these kinds of promotional articles, this is just a reminder for me to do it.

All gift links. Enjoy.

• Jacobin magazine interviews Lily Lynch: Serbia Is a Showcase of Authoritarian Neoliberalism. An objective assessment of the situation in the Balkans, if you are interested in that sort of thing. It covers not only Serbia but Montenegro as well, and Kosovo too for those who consider it separately. The prime minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, comes out well. Everyone else — “the West” included — not so much.
• Jeff Atwood: Is Worse Really Better? Starts with a brilliantly disturbing story from Steve Martin then riffs on an excellent observation he had: “The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: it was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the circumstances.”
• Mike Solana: The Abundance Delusion. The book is still sitting on my pile, less and less likely to be read as time goes on, and here comes a very good rebuttal if not of the book then of the movement it spurred.
• Emi Nietfeld of Wired: The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It? A harrowing tale of surrogacy.

I am writing this from an Apple Vision Pro, VisionOS 26 Beta 8, no additional hardware, just pecking away at the virtual keyboard. A few thoughts:

• I am convinced that no person younger than 40 was involved in the decision-making during its development.
• The basis for this is that the pass-through looks better each time I use it, not because the camera, screens or software have improved but because I am developing presbyiopia (near-sightedness of old age), and rapidly.
• This is also why I suspect there are still no good VR-first games or even a proper controller.
• Why can’t I stream a PS5 game onto a huge screen? I thought Apple and Sony were friendy.
• The carrying case is too bulky for short work trips, which would have been my primary use.
• They had 18 months to work on the virtual typing experience and it is still a nightmare by default.
• For a tolerable experience I suggest enlarging it to maximum size, posiyioning it so that you can use both index fingers with elbows supported, then imagine you are using an old typewritter with sticky keys that are prone to jamming.
• Still, no regrets.

• Scott Sumner: The myths of Chinese exceptionalism. Very good! He has several quotes from Dan Wang at the end, and if you like those then you will certainly like
• Ross Douthat: Does the Future Belong to China? An interview with Dan Wang, with both video and a transcript. Reminder, Wang’s book Breakneck came out last month and quickly made its way to my pile (and the bestseller list, but I won’t hold that against it).
• Alex Tabarrok: The Simple Mathematics of Chinese Innovation. A short but sweet account with many more links. He also wrote about China Versus the US in the Competition for Global Talent.
• Alex Tabarrok (again): Could China Have Gone Christian? Betteridge’s law of headlines applies.

Seen on X and confirmed during my run today: the Trump banner has been removed from the Department of Labor. Good. It never belonged there.

Our two-week visit to the beaches of Montenegro was, overall, a bust.

The fault was mine. I tried to recreate the one perfect day we had there last year, on a secluded beach accessible only by boat and with crystal-clear water perfect for snorkeling but with amenities like a small cafe, working restrooms and lounge chairs. To do that, we booked a place that was minutes away from the dock closest to that beach in ⊕ Rating for Čanj: thumbs down, one star, would not go again. Čanj, a small and fairly undeveloped town.

The idea was to take the 10-minute boat ride there each day and do nothing but swim, with some rest and book reading in between laps. The reality was that:

• The beach saw a marked decline in quality since last year, owing to — I kid you not — the proprietor of the cafe getting in a fight with the person with rights to put lounge chairs on the beach, resulting in neither being available, no working restrooms, and the surrounding area being littered with used wet wipes and worse (hey, if you gotta go you gotta go).
• Not every member of our large 12-person group was fully on board with spending most of the day on a beach like that, or any beach really, seeing that they weren’t great swimmers.
• The water was absolutely freezing, even in early August, which is on one hand good because rising temperatures in the Mediterranean sea were tied to climate change, but on the other hand you really had to swim to survive and again not everyone was up for that.

And then, 6 days into our 14-day stay, there was a fire. This sent one half of our group back home to Serbia earlier than planned, and my own clan to ⊕ Rating for Ulcinj: thumbs up, five stars, will go again. Ulcinj, which was the furthest away we could have imagined to go and get away from the smoke. We spent 3 days there, and those were in fact the highlight of the trip because Ulcinj and our last-minute apartment booking were both breathtakingly beautiful. Sadly, the small town beach was a sandy muddy mess, and the larger, 12-kilometer long strip of sand was both too far away and reminded us too much of what we could get in our backyard, so we had to find an alternative for the remainder of our stay.

So we ended up at a resort. Not just any resort, but the first ever ⊕ Rating for the Montenegro Radisson: thumb horizontal, 3 stars, would only come in the off-season so unlikely it would ever happen again. Radisson in Montenegro, or rather a 10-ish or so-year-old complex of beautiful stone-encrusted seaside property that got its Radisson license this year. Not exactly the beach — it sat on a piece of rock so the main way to get into the water were ladders — but it was again crystal-clear, only slightly warmer, and with a greater variety of sea life than the one we first had in mind.

The first day was a fairy-tale ending to our trip-to-date. Sadly, we had 5 more days that all but destroyed our initial impression:

• Smoking was encouraged, by the fact that there were ashtrays everywhere and that even the employees would light up during work hours, including while setting up lounge chairs in a just-opened and otherwise completely empty pool.
• On the other hand, wearing UV-protective swimwear was discouraged. We had several requests from the staff for our 6-year-old to take the upper half of his swimsuit off. Our takeaway from this and the above was that the Radisson in Montenegro had a general pro-cancer stance.
• There exists, we were reminded during our recent trip to Valencia, a kind of effortless hospitality that makes you feel welcome and at-home without being either too pushy or too bootlicky. Unfortunately, the resort staff was not familiar with that or any other type of hospitality, being more inclined to either argue or behave like they were my old drinking buddies.

Topping everything off, our return car trip reminded us that Montenegro sorely lacks infrastructure to accommodate the number of people it receives during the summer, which is not helped by summer-time road closures for repairs. This is unfortunate, because Montenegro is a microcosmos of every possible beach you can find, from Thai island-like seclusion to Greek island wilderness to the Wildwood-level expanses of sand, all in a sub-300km stretch of coastline. If and when we ever come back, it will be on a boat.