📸 Day 9: Baking.

A box of Honolulu’s finest malassadas. We learned about the place from our Lyft driver who turned out to be a fellow Serbian immigrant. Small world.

• Adam Mastroianni: So you wanna de-bog yourself. Mastroianni has a playful way with words that is a joy to read regardless of the topic, but this one in particular fits nicely in the New Year resolution-making season. It is Oliver Burkeman-like advice condensed into shorter snippets, for those who have not yet reached middle age.
• David Allen (or whoever writes his newsletter): The biggest secret about goal setting. Note that there is a big difference between setting your own personal goals and the several steps-removed goals that management gives to their teams. The bit about changing the saliency landscape applies to both.
• Yann LeCun: “the concept (of general intelligence) is compete BS”; the Nobel prize winner Demis Hassabis disagrees. But the fourth paragraph of that rebuttal is precisely what LeCun was talking about (mistaking specific for the general because it has “general” in the name).
• Karl Schroeder: Stop Thinking. ⊕ ᔥJohn Naughton On the difference between “understanding” — which is the analytical method that the people in the rationalist community, LLMs, and Mr. Spock do extremely well — and “reasoning”, which I understand (hah!) to be more akin to Charlie Munger’s mental models, applied intuitively, fluidly, and to the rationalist’s eyes haphazardly. Feel free to apply this distinction to the debate one bullet point above.
• Lily Lynch: Serbia’s Vučić Enters Deeper International Isolation. Could not have happened to a more deserving person! Although of course this means nothing but bad news for my fatherland so I wish El Presidente all the best in the New Year and may what is left of his reign be peaceful if not very long.

📸 Day 8: Grinch.

No photos of the guy on my camera roll, but is this Tawny Frogmouth we saw at the Norfolk Zoo not a spitting image? Just paint him green and call it a day.

🍿 Wake Up Dead Man (2025) was a better murder mystery than Glass Onion with a more poignant message than either of its predecessors. Rian Johnson has an uncanny ability to pick the right topic to pick on, and the theme of religious revival was spot on.

📸 Day 7: Solstice.

These stone pillars at the Kadinjača monument in Western Serbia are not exactly Stonehenge, but maybe they do align with the stars? Incidentally, the Yugoslav World War 2 monument architecture is the only kind of brutalism I can get behind.

HBO not renewing Scavengers Reign was bad enough, but I recently learned that the news was even worse. Netflix, too, had passed on the opportunity even with the Season 2 teaser being everything I could have hoped for.

Time for Apple TV to pick it up! How do we make it happen?

📸 Day 6: Sparkle.

You don’t have to wait for the holiday season to light some sparklers. This one was from a trip to the Outer Banks, cropped to protect the innocent.

• V.H. Belvadi: Working with the end in sight. ⊕ ᔥPhil Bowell, who also noted the beautiful site design. Matches my own experience with Zettelkasten/Slip-box systems, in that none of the very productive people in academia I know actually use anything close to them. Belvadi is sticking to markdown files edited in BBEdit; I am partial to DEVONThink and TinderBox although both of them can also punt text files to BBEdit, which is on my list of should-learn apps.
• Andrej Karpathy: Chemical hygiene. This list of sensible advice for managing our own environment appeared in my RSS reader as part of the Bear blog discovery feed, with small-a “andrej” listed as the author. Since I found myself nodding along to most of it The risk of chemical exposure while handling paper receipts is overblown unless you work at a cash register, in which case you really should wear gloves. I clicked through to check out this andrej’s other work and lo, it was Andrej Karpathy. Unsurprisingly, his 2025 LLM Year in Review was also quite good.
• Brooklyn Gibbs: how to use the internet again: a curriculum. ⊕ ᔥThought Shrapnel, with a much better re-title. Online literacy for adults and children alike. Note in particular that there exist things outside the web: see Project Gemini for an example of a cozy part of the Internet that is very much distinct from the World Wide Web.
• Matthew Haughey: Recent camping and travel discoveries. We will have a fourth-grader in the household next year which means a National Parks pass for the whole family, so this may come in useful!