📸 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.

📚 Finished reading: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, which is a continuation of his blog posts and essays on the word he coined. I was worried that this would be a pointless pad-job, like what David Graber did for his similarly scatological Bullshit Jobs. But no, the topic is deep and Doctorow’s book explores those depths with competency and good humor.

What I most appreciate is that the solutions aren’t of the end-user “use paper straws” type. The point is not to boycott Amazon, leave all social media, move to a Kaczynski-style cottage; rather it is to put pressure on local, state and federal lawmakers to do their jobs and prevent the country’s slide to full-on technofeudalism. This is another delightful term, popularized by Yanis Varoufakis who himself has direct experience working for a feudal lord, Valve. Yes, there is a book and yes, I it is now on the ever-growing pile. Although, I still plan on canceling our household’s Prime subscription and redirecting the money to EFF.

Note that Doctorow describes himself as leftist and calls people “comrade”, a term at which I tend to recoil. He also sings praises to the EU legislature, of which I am profoundly sceptical. Still. We can agree that Big Tech is too big and that their bosses are too cozy with the government, and that between European Union’s incompetence and the American increasingly corporatized state only one has a straight path to totalitarianism, the final destination of end-stage enshittification.

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.

• Joe Wilkins: McDonald’s Pulls Down AI-Generated Holiday Ad After Deluge of Mockery. The offensive ad is still available for viewing, and I am horrified to report that it is in fact on par with non-AI holiday marketing shlock. Every profession that feels collectively threatened by LLMs has spent decades undermining itself and is now reaping what it sowed, and yes I include many medical specialties here.
• Sam Kriss for the NYT: Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? A brilliant essay with illustrations that would make me blow a fuse if I were to see them out in the wild. Kriss has a blog to which I am now subscribed and also seems to post on this new social network for writers called… Substack? And Curtis Yarvin plus the rationalist buffoons hate him? Worth following!
• Christopher Butler: The Last Invention. “The real threat of AI as ‘the last invention’ isn’t that it will actually end human innovation and put us all out to pasture in a withering culture of leisure, but that we’ll believe it will. That we’ll internalize the narrative of our own obsolescence and stop trying. That we’ll mistake the tool for the maker and forget that the heart that yearns past the boundary is what drives everything forward.”
• Andrew Sharp: Netflix and the Flattening of Everything. I am not a fan of Netflix. In fact, I dread the moment when they gobble up the last thing, idea or person standing on their path to entertainment singularity. And yet I stay subscribed.
• Taylor Jessen on Mastodon: Candidate for Post of the Year. The post in question is a screenshot from Bluesky which perfectly demonstrates end-stage enshittifaction of what used to be the capital-I Internet, but that is beside the point which is in fact funny and true.

• Ruxandra Teslo and Jack Scannell: To Get More Effective Drugs, We Need More Human Trials. I maintain that this will be nigh-impossible to do in the US until we break the healthcare ouroboros. AI as used now, to increase the number of drug candidates without making a dent in the speed of actually testing them, will only make things worse.
• Benjamin Mazer for The Atlantic: Yes, Some Children May Have Died From COVID Shots. Indeed, and the attempts to say otherwise can only Streisand the issue that should have been just a footnote to the long list of historical vaccine concerns.
• Simon DeDeo: Advice for Early-Career Academics, Part I: Mentorship. No-nonsense advice I wish I had 20-some years ago. I particularly like the distinction between mentors, supporters, fans, friendly elephants and noble adversaries. Left unmentioned are the many people who don’t have your best interest at heart.
• Michael Levy on YouTube: “Hurrian Hymn no. 6” (c.1400BCE) - Ancient Mesopotamian Musical Fragment. The Hurrian songs come not from Mesopotamia but from Ugarit, a city in what is now northern Syria which was one of many victims of the Late Bronze Age collapse. One would hope this would put to rest any questions on whether the humans of that age were like us, but then there are people alive now who don’t think their contemporaries are anything like them.

Let the year-in-review season begin. First up is flying, courtesy of Flighty. Here’s hoping for fewer miles travelled in 2026!