📸 Day 3: Firelight, under which desert always looks better. This one was in The Grill from Ipanema almost a decade ago.

• Jacob Savage: The Lost Generation

A story of white male millennials being blocked from career advancement because of DEI. The fields he highlights are scripted television shows, news magazines and academia which aren’t exactly thriving now but per Savage did back when these policies were being implemented (early to mid-2010s). The rise of the “manosphere” and crypto brotherhood was therefore revenge of the jilted, which sounds plausible. One does not become an NFT peddler because they want to but because they couldn’t fulfill their life-long dream of being a tenured Women’s Studies professor.

Note that only early-career positions seem to have been affected, where people with no skill and/or time to choose among many qualified candidates decided to simultaneously switch from one discriminatory heuristic to another. So maybe not everyone should have done it at the same time (a good policy to follow for any change)? Would a method for unbiased selection of early job candidates have to involve an AI? And what are the demographic of OpenAI and Meta’s leadership again?

• Derek Lowe: Where Are They Now: Verge Genomics

A Y Combinator company tries to use machine learning to discover new drugs. No, they didn’t figure it out and are now pivoting to selling pickaxes instead of digging for gold themselves. Godspeed.

• Hiya Jain: A Case Study In Scientific Coordination

Retelling of the story of penicillin’s discovery and mass manufacturing, which is much more complex than the typical serendipity-is-important (or, sometimes, luck-favors-the-prepared-mind) tale that begins and ends with Alexander Fleming’s accidentally contaminating a bacterial culture with mold. This is not to disparage the more popular variant: a big part of my childhood was soaking up wild tales of invention via Discoveries Unlimited which originally came out in the year of my birth but was dubbed to Serbian and played on repeat on state TV in the early 1990s. Of course, my own children now have something infinitely more majestic than the “Video Encyclopedia” from that show… and use it to play Roblox.

• Azhdarchid: Thematic expression in game design, or: Why Dune (1992) rules

This also took me back! And not only because of Dune, which I played several times through the end and liked much more than the sequel, one of the first real-time strategy games. No, this article is also about It came from the desert and Sid Meier’s Pirates! and many other games that used short-but-sweet bursts of different mechanics to tell a coherent story, which is qualitatively different from a collection of mini-games sold to highlight the multi-functionality of Nintendo’s new controller. I hope an indie game studio somewhere is working on bringing them back.

• Merriam-Webster: Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.. A year behind the times, no? Although, same could be said about Oxford’s.
• eryney marrogi: This paper is being interpreted as something it isnt.. The paper in question being about AI-designed super-proteins, with claims of the proteins' supremacy being somewhat overstated, particularly by the perennial AI alarmist whom Marrogi quote-tweets. Although the thought of humans creating new super-stable proteins by any means, LLM or no LLM, does give me heartburn. Haven’t these people heard of prions?
• Chris Arnade: I just always assumed Oliver Sacks was bullshitting. Hey, I did too, so a profile in The New Yorker to which Arnade refers was no surprise. Caveat lector, always and forever.
• Anil Dash: Cory take decades of fluency in how these systems are broken and serve it up for a mainstream audiences. That’s about Cory Doctorow’s interview for The Daily Show, and I guess I missed the news on Jon Stewart being re-replaced. For a longer pontification from Doctorow, see his conversation with Aaron Bastani.

📸 Day 2 of micro.blog’s Winter Wonder Photo Challenge and the word of the day is cozy.

So, here are some cozy web stickers that will make any office cubicle (or — shudders — an open office) hospitable.

📸 December 15 is Day 1 of the micro.blog photoblogging challenge. I participated the last two years (September 2023 and April 2024) so it would truly be poor form not to continue.

Today’s theme is frost. I hope frosting (or is it icing?) on this Smith Island cake will suffice!

• Scott Sumner: The Great Depression: Elevator pitch. Wherein Sumner outlines his book on the Great Depression, The Midas Paradox, which I haven’t read but is now on the pile. Even just the outline has brought my level of understanding from zero to a vague sense of what went wrong.
• Ernie Smith: Compartmentalizing. I knew about the shipping container revolution before reading this brief history on Tedium, but I forgot just how much ships themselves transformed to accommodate the new invention to the point of being overoptimized.
• Sasha Gusev: Embryo selection company Herasight goes all in on eugenics. What it says on the tin, and these people are brain-dead morons who want to use polygenic risk scores for the betterment of society. The company’s white paper lists Benefits to future people as the very first item under the section “Moral reasons for embryo screening”. Gusev, a geneticist, has written an excellent overview of why polygenic risk scores are not that straightforward to use for even individual embryo selection and personally I think it is a terrible idea, but to each their own for individual decisions. The betterment of society ploy, however, is playing with fire that already burned through Europe not 100 years ago.
• Jay Caspian Kang for The New Yorker: If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?. Subtitle: “Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences.” My answer is that it depends, although the author would very much like for us to apply Betteridge’s law in our heads. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
• Kyla Scanlon: Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy. At this point Scanlon’s essays are starting to blend in with one another, but I would like to highlight this one for pointing out a smart thing Paul Krugman wrote, The link is to his Substack newsletter, not the actual post, because that is for some reason the link Scanlon included in her own essay. Not being a Krugman reader myself I can’t tell if this is what he actually wrote or if it is Scanlon’s clever interpretation. Frustrating. which I understand to be a rare occurrence. Here are three concepts not captured by standard economics analysis that are contributing to the financial malaise:

1. Economic inclusion: Can you afford to participate in society?
2. Security: Are you one broken tooth away from bankruptcy?
3. Fairness: Are you being scammed?

Sounds right.

Infrastructure weekend continues. After changing the fonts, I have decided to simplify the color scheme and (finally!) change the name of the blog from micro.blog’s default, which was my own name, to the “Infinite Regress” heading. My name standing there in big bold letters looked a bit too self-promotional.

Of course, that means that there are now two Infinite Regress blogs — here is the old one — but I guess I will have to reconcile that some other time. The original idea was to post small updates here and keep the old domain for a digital garden-like website, but then I realized that 1) I don’t care much for digital gardens, and 2) there are enough self-referential links here to justify the name. And I already had the infinity symbol up in front of untitled posts. Easy decision.

None of this should matter if you are following along via RSS, which is in fact my preferred method and the reason why these updates are so overdue. Unfortunately, the Tufte theme side notes and margin notes don’t transfer well to feed readers and end up looking like an unintentional insertion. This is item number 1 for my next infrastructure weekend. Number 2 would be figuring out which domain name forwards where. Number 3, of course, is world domination.

My font fiddling continues. Google fonts as recommended by ChatGPT are out, Charter, Cooper Hewitt and Source Code Pro as recommended by Matthew Butterick in his delightful Practical Typography are in. Next up, the color scheme.