It’s a gorgeous day for picking apples.

I mean, just look at these clouds.

And, of course, the star of the show. It’s apple pie time tomorrow.

• autoeq.app which will give you the most pleasing equalizier settings for your brand of headphones and EQ software
• QuickNotes, a simple voice transcription app for iOS from Matt Birchler
• Luminar, unapologetically Japanese photo editing software
• Andrej Karpathy’s interview with Dwarkesh Patel, for a dose of techno-realism
• The Empire Podcast, for its 10-part series on Gaza

Have a good weekend, all.

• From Ruxandra Teslo, a story of early retirees having to come out of retirement. I am not shedding tears.
• From an anonymous friend, a very good podcast with Dan Wang.
• From a West coast scientist, a commercial genetic test that can predict an embryo’s IQ. To be clear, I do think this is a test of intelligence but not in the way the company intended: their idea is moronic.
• From geneticist Sasha Gusev, an agreement about the above.
• From Brian Potter of the Institute For Progress, an excerpt from his book “The Origins of Efficiency” which clarifies why it costs more to repair things than to buy new ones. Surprisingly, he thinks this is good and wants to efficientize even more things!

• Adam Cifu: Goodharts Law and Medical School Admissions. A significant contributor to scientific slop is “research output” as requirement for fellowship, residency, and even medical school admissions. And yes, I am also a fan of the law.
• Paul Teirstein for WSJ: The Gatekeeper Driving Doctors From Medicine. On board certification, which now seems to have some powerful enemies so consider me conflicted.
• Jonathan D. Cohen and Isaac Rose-Berman for NYT: Gambling. Investing. Gaming. There’s No Difference Anymore. “There should be a line of separation,” Alexander Hamilton [wrote] in 1792, “between respectable stockholders … and mere unprincipled Gamblers.” As a side note, it is incredible how much sports betting has exploded in the 15 years I’ve been in the US. One of many ways America is looking more and more like Serbia, where seedy gambling outposts are now more common than grocery stores.
• Brian Potter: More on US Pedestrian Deaths. An update of a previously linked-to post, which raises more questions than answers. Allow me to be somewhat conspiratorial: could worse hospital care combined with increasing organ donation contribute to this increase? There have been 3,200 more pedestrian deaths in 2023 compared to 2009 and 8,393 more deceased donor donations according to OPTN. And then there is this.

• Raghuveer Parthasarathy: Reading Like It’s 1937. The experiment was to choose only books published in a single year and read these in a short period of time. As expected, there were more duds than classics, and with not that many books coming out in 1937 it amount to very few good books indeed. This kind of experimentation does support the claim that we live in a literary golden age, and I’d say it’s because of a combination of high absolute numbers and us being better at detecting edge cases, not necessarily that the relative percentage of classics per year has increased. If anything, it is probably much lower because of all the AI-generated slop.
• Mike Taylor: If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you advertise the fact? The AI tools described are indeed stupid, but remember that the marginal cost for advertising them is 0, and if you find them stupid you were never the intended audience. In that way they very much resemble phone scams and emails from a Nigerian prince.
• David Shaywitz: The Startling History Behind Merck’s New Cancer Blockbuster. A story from 8 years ago, but it was news to me that pembrolizumab had a very roundabout way of reaching patients. GLP-1 inhibitors had a slightly less circuitous route, but still took too long to get to where they are. Is this truly the best way to develop drugs? (↬Derek Lowe)
• Cal Newport: Is Sora the Beginning of the End for OpenAI? Probably not, and this is not really an edge case, but as someone who has trouble concluding blog posts (which is why you’re reading a list) I just wanted to pause and admire that last sentence.

The British crime drama Broadchurch came out in 2013. John Favreau’s food porn vanity project Chef was released in 2014. Despite both now being more than a decade old, in my mind they are still filed under “new things that came out that we missed because we had an infant in the house while also being medical residents”. It was therefore jarring to see how dated they both were, and for similar reasons.

Broadchurch deals with the murder of an 11-year-old boy in a small coastal community. Twitter is mentioned a handful of times, only in the context of breaking news. There is no Instagram or messaging apps: pre-teens email each other. The boy’s family is at a loss for how to attract national attention to the killing and finds the answer in a tabloid journalist. It all feels quaint, though admittedly I don’t know if that was intentional even in 2013 (from the edgy music and the oh-so serious tone of the show, I suspect not). I won’t mention a recent British show by name for fear of spoiling other, but if you’ve seen both you will now what is the clear parallel and how much things have changed.

Chef, on the other hand, is completely Twitter-dependent, and is arguably one of the first movies to use Twitter #MainCharacter dynamics as a plot point (Justine Sacco had landed a few months before the movie was released, and probably wasn’t even on Favreau’s radar). Twitter is shown in a completely positive light, and I can’t think of any other movie that has done that. It is also a good time capsule of the food trucks on Twitter craze. The early 2010s were the peak time for both, before culture wars killed one and covid the other.

So now I am inclined to see what else came out in that 2010–2015 period. Is it too early to be nostalgic for those times?