Ada Palmer doesn’t blog much, but whenever she does it goes right to the top of my reading list. Today’s text was about censorship. The key point:

The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.

In particular:

If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would. If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time. The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.

There are more recent examples as well, from the 1950s comic book scare to the modern-day school library controversies.

By the way, I have just started reading the first book of Too Like Lightning, her sci-fi trilogy, and two chapters in I am completely hooked.

I don’t care much for self-help and productivity any more, but if Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity is anything like 4,000 weeks then of course I’ll get it. Pre-orders have started, and will get you some goodies if you follow these instructions before the March 5th release.

📚 Finished reading: Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, and reading something from 70-plus years ago that now seems prophetic never gets old. What if people’s appetite for food was as distorted as their current — 1950s, mind you — appetite for sex, he asks himself and answers:

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

Well guess what, Mr. Lewis…

Bullet bit, and Kagi is now my default search engine. An unexpected benefit was their LLM, which gave good answers to a standard set of questions. Between Apple coming out with a new platform, services popping up left and right and a blog resurgence it’s like mid-2000s without the financial crisis.

❄️ After two snowless years, we now have our second snow day, almost back-to-back. With Monday’s MLK day and Wednesday’s delayed opening, did kids have had a grand total of 1.5 days of school this week.

The response in parents' chat groups: tears in pre-K, an equanimous thumb up in 6th grade.

🍿 The first movie snow days bring to mind is, of course, A Christmas Story (1983). The second one is not its bloodless sequel but rather 8-bit Christmas (2021), the true spiritual successor. The snow day scene there is one of the best, but nowhere to be found online. Best to watch the whole thing!

I have been reading with interest about the Epic versus Apple in-app payment saga, but have no respect for either of the parties. Epic, because they pretend to care about the developer ecosystem when all they want is to be the gatekeeper instead of the gatekeeper. Apple, because they claim higher ground, ⊕ The words “Apple” and “higher ground” in the same sentence of course bring to mind Marco Arment’s essay, but the ground Apple lost 9 years ago has since been reclaimed. wanting to keep their walled garden pristine and free of bad actors, while the garden is in fact overgrown with weeds. Where the roses bushes used to be there are now squatter tents pitched, mangy dogs guarding the perimeter. The magnolias are on fire. Somewhere in the distance a mother cries for her lost child.

You see, our four-year-old has developed an interest in sea animals. Sharks in particular, but any saltwater organism will do. To nurture that interest, I scoured the iPad App Store for anything that a) features the ocean and b) is in the 4+ age category. I should have known better than to trust Apple’s own search, because the results were a disaster: “games” that let you play for all of 30 seconds before serving you a noisy add that can only be closed by tapping repeatedly on an 8-point sized barely visible white “x” even after the mandatory 1-minute lockout period when all you can do is watch low-resolution mock-ups of what may or may not be the game that you will get if you are successfully tricked into downloading whatever they are selling; or “edutainment” products that pop up offers for $99.99 in-app purchases after each tap; or once-reputable game developers who deck out their 4+-approved shark simulators with so many bells, whistles, and requests to buy their in-game currency that you may as well have sent your child to an Atlantic City casino. And not one of the good ones.

In what universe, then, is Apple’s repeated shakedown of Hey not simply evil? Why is the company protecting its adult users from the horrors of an app that is unusable without an externally created account, but is just fine with four-year-olds being bombarded with advertisements and offers for double-digit in-app purchases of worthless game credits? Having even half-way decent curation and a usable search screen would be ideal. Any one of those without the other would also be acceptable. As of January 2024, the iPad/iPhone App Store has neither, and it is a disaster. And Apple has the gal to charge 15–30% for the privilege of being listed in that pigsty.

If Apple’s other App Stores — Mac and AppleTV — are not like that, it is only because they are not worth the scammers' attention. In less than 24 hours I will log into a different Apple store and pay almost four thousand dollars — about a thousand more than my first ever monthly paycheck as a medical resident a dozen or so years ago — for the privilege of playing with their new doohickey. I can only hope that Vision Pro does not become too popular: a 360° full-immersion experience of the iPhone/iPad App Store would not be pretty, though lovers of gross-out horror may be appreciative.

📺 I have high hopes for the fourth season of True Detective. There is no one better to play a detective in an ice-cold town than Jodie Foster. And the frigid, sunless setting pairs well with the Arctic weather we have been having. Now if only the murder mystery itself actually went somewhere.