• Istanbul airport is Asian more than Western, and shows what type of people are expected to travel by plane in Turkey. The more I travel outside the US the more American airports resemble Greyhound bus stations, which, good for the US of A!
• Turkey used to be where you went for shopping at bargain-basement prices. Not any more, at least if your main currency is the dollar. Either the Turkish Lira is overvalued or the USD is undervalued — or why not both? — but nothing in Istanbul felt like a bargain.
• The above doesn’t even take into consideration the differential pricing for museum entry, whereby foreigners pay an order of magnitude higher prices thank someone with a Turkish ID card. This is generally fair and I consider it a “domestic discount” rather than a tourist markup.
• Per my hosts — I am too lazy to verify but do feel free to check — the city doubled in size in the last two decades and stretches across more than a hundred kilometers. The unfortunate souls who live on the Asian side but work on the European (broadly working-class) or vice versa (broadly middle and upper-middle class) both face hours-long commutes even with enviable (for American standards) public transport.
• This rapid increase in population is due in part to quick-and-dirty builds that aren’t necessarily earthquake-proof, and everyone is waiting for the next big one to hit the city and decimate it. Draw your own conclusions on how that may affect the citizen psyche.
• The underground Basilica Cistern should be counted as one of the Wonders of the World, more so than Haiga Sofia which has clearly seen better days. See also Belgrad Forest, about which I learned while visiting the cistern.
• Talismanic shirts.
• We did not have a bad meal, each one in a typical “Turkish” restaurant with meze and some seafood but each with a completely different array of dishes and ingredients. Pursley (sic!) was a revelation.
• The beer was mediocre — though at least one more Western-leaning place had Duvel on the menu — but I liked raki (with a bit of water and plenty of ice) more than I expected considering I am not a fan of anis.
• Surprising number of infants and toddlers out on the street playing past midnight. Napping during the summer heat and using the cooler night air for some outdoor time?
• Serbian language is full of turcisms so I expected to recognize at least some of the written signs, but those were few and far between. Then I realized the words I know as “Turkish” were imported centuries ago thousands of kilometers away from current-day Turkey. Indeed some of them my hosts recognized as what the very old people living in far-away provinces might have once said.
• Four days weren’t nearly enough.

• Spain may be closer to Florida in GDP, but it is a near-perfect match to California in landscape and climate — without the earthquakes and with much more affordable real estate. I am not surprised they have a problem with foreigners buying up properties, but I was surprised not to see even more tourists in Valencia and towns south like Dénia.
• American service industry know-how never quite recovered after covid lockdowns, so it was a pleasant surprise to see it alive and well in Valencia province and the city proper. Even the worst establishment we’ve visited — a newly-opened, somewhat touristy restaurant with an unexperienced server — was better than the median East Coast sit-down place.
• An excellent example of effortless hospitality was the Westin hotel in Mestalla that made us, three sloppy Serbian-Americans (not all of the children came, and I should write more about this strategy of bringing kids over to trips), not feel out-of-place even though most other visitors dressed as and behaved as royalty. We are very familiar with the “you shouldn’t be here” look, and it just wasn’t there.
• This may be too specific, but that Westin also had the best indoor swimming pool out of the many we have used.
• There is no bad place to put a few small tables and chairs and serve cold beer, nuts, olives and a plate of cheese and ham for a few euros each. Or, if you live close to the beach, put up your own folding table and chairs and have a friend & family gathering.
• The above are so widespread because even the “big” apartments are generally small by American standards — yes, I have been looking at real estate listings — so most people want to hang out in “third places”. Every other article from Chris Arnade mentions this so it isn’t a groundbreaking thought, but it’s nice to see it confirmed.
• Speaking of real estate: price per square foot in Valencia is cheaper than in Belgrade which tells me that either Valencia is massively underrated, Belgrade is overrated, or most likely both.
• Bad people sometimes do good things, and Franco did a good one for Valencia by moving the Turia river out of and around the town which 1) saved the city itself from being flooded including just last year and 2) gave it acres and acres of priceless green spaces that are within walking distance to most of the population.
• This was my second time in the area and I plan on coming back at least a few more so yes, I liked it.

• From the FT Editorial Board: The risk of letting AI do your thinking (the only nit I have to pick here is that by “AI” the esteemed Board means “LLMs” or, if you want to be kind and stretch the definition of intelligence, “generative AI”)
• From Dave Winer: AI should behave like a computer (see previous note)
• From a person on the Internet: Cognitive Hygiene: Why You Need to Make Thinking Hard Again (file under YouTube videos that should have been blog posts)
• From Michael Lopp: Every Single Human. Like. Always. (subtitle: The robots… They did the thing.)

And with these four links I hereby declare a moratorium on LLM-related matters on this blog, until further notice.

An important note from Dave Winer:

I say ChatGPT instead of “AI” because I’m not comfortable characterizing it as intelligence. Deeper you get into it you learn that these beings whatever they are have serious character flaws that are counter-intelligent.

Exactly. LLMs are closer in intelligence to a screwdriver than to a human.

For a contrarian take on LLMs as intelligent machines, here is Alexey Guzey saying that:

• ChatGPT understands what it reads
• LLMs are creative
• Compression is intelligence and ChatGPT compresses really well
• The idea of AGI is stupid
• It doesn’t matter if AGI is real or not

I remain dubious.

• Vinay Prasad Is a Bernie Sanders Acolyte in MAHA Drag (Apologies for linking to the WSJ. Please file it under “textbook hit piece”, that worked.)
• Zero-sum Thinking and the Labor Market (From Kyla Scanlon, whose substack blog is a jewel.)
• Design Your Own Rug! (We just came back from Istanbul, where rugs are no longer made by hand and the ones who are sold as such were made 40+ years ago and “refreshed. These are from Afghanistan and are “only” around $1K.)
• Belgrad Forest on Wikipedia (Speaking of Istanbul, the forest closest to it was named after the village next to it, “settled by thousands of Serbs who were deported to the capital Constantinople from the city of Belgrade in 1521” — to maintain a millennium-old Byzantine aqueduct. Please file it under “isn’t history fascinating”.)

• Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, an intro to this book that will make its way onto the pile as soon as it comes out
• Inclusivity In Healthcare Should Not Be Valued Above Our Paramount Mandate: First, Do No Harm (controversial?)
• New capitalism III: Capital from Branko Milanović, who should be on the short list for the “Nobel” in economics for this series of posts alone
• Things: The Surprising Power of Stuff That Exists is a brilliant description of every book Malcolm Gladwell and his lookalikes ever published

Note: While these link posts are usually untitled, this one is in reference to recent troubles at the Marginal Revolution blog. Isn’t HTML great?

I have updated my now page. The last update was in March so let’s call this my Quarterly-ish update.