Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

📸 Day 11: Feast.

We have made countless food spreads for ourselves and the kids, but here is one that they made for us. And it was delicious!

📸 Day 10: Travel.

Of which we did a lot this year. The first trip was to San Francisco to see some of its tilted houses or, in this case, a tilted hotel.

📸 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.

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?