Nilay Patel at The Verge gave Apple Vision Pro a 7, the same score Meta Quest 3 got from David Pierce just 3 months earlier. And if you read their scoring guidelines it makes sense, a 7 is “very good; a solid product with some flaws”, 10 being “the best of the best”. But then of course a 7 is the best headsets can be right now, given the tech’s limitations, right?

Well, no. Oculus Quest 2 scored an 8 — “Excellent. A superb product with minor or very few flaws.” — so now I am confused. Why give out numeric scores at all if you will be so slapdash about it?

Adam Mastroianni writes about the declining trust in scientific institutions:

I, too, would like to beat the charlatans and the terrorists, which is why I want to do better than, “Don’t trust those guys—they lack the proper accreditation!” If that’s all you got, people shouldn’t trust you. Instead of arguing from expertise, you should use your expertise to make better arguments.

As much as I would like to proclaim that this was my thinking all along, and that institutional decay was why I went for medical residency before completing a PhD, well, I can’t — it was a wholly different set of reasons. But it seems to have been a good decision, so I’ll allow myself a pat on the back.

The Iconfactory’s Project Tapestry is interesting and pretty, but feels like reinventing the wheel and throws RSS under the bus (emphasis mine):

Blogs, microblogs, social networks, weather alerts, webcomics, earthquake warnings, photos, RSS feeds - it’s all out there in a million different places, and you’ve gotta cycle through countless different apps and websites to keep up.

What in the world are they on about? RSS feeds do collate all of this. How is what they want to do any better than textcasting? I can see how it’s worse — it would be view-only, without posting and editing.

🏀 Yesterday, the Eastern Conference’s worst team pummeled the Western Conference’s best, one day after losing to the second-worst. Every sport is non-transitive, but basketball is extreme.

🍿 Toma (2023) is a biopic of a Serbian folk singer Toma Zdravković, and yes I’m biased but it was much more enjoyable than the more and less recent Hollywood attempts at the genre. Here is the problem: it is not available for streaming anywhere, there is little to no information about it online, and if you try to search for it you will get information about a 2023 TV show that is basically extra footage packaged into an 8-episode mini series.

So how many more international gems are out there, unavailable and unknown outside of their tiny target market? The internet is the first wonder of the modern world, but for all its greatness it also gives us a false sense of access to everything when there are in fact untold treasures disappearing at the margin.

Here is something to warm your heart: a story about Lily Gladstone and the Blackfeet Nation in The Washington Post. Makes me want to see Killers of the Flower Moon this weekend, but from what I’ve heard the movie is, alas, far from heartwarming.

🍿 The Father (2020) shows that the simplest of premises can make for the best of movies. Christopher Nolan, take note.

That draft being the thing that you are reading now.

Last year I wrote about my approach to blogging but maybe I should have a post pinned up top that specify exactly what kind of a blog this is. Because “blog” has become a suitcase word, meaning different things to different people. To name a few:

1. SEO-optimized clickbait farms, à la BuzzFeed and HuffPost (which is Joe Q. Public’s idea of a blog)
2. A topic-oriented mix of long articles and link posts, à la Daring Fireball and Kottke.org (which is my idea of the default “blog”)
3. Carefully cultivated collections of essays, the owners of which sometimes emphatically insists that they are not blogs, à la Maggie Appleton and Gwern Branwen (Substack and Medium may also fall under here)
4. Stream-of-thought title-less short posts interspersed with longer but still underbaked articles, à la Dave Winer (and much of the micro.blog community, present company included)

Numbers 1 and 4 are as far apart as you can get but there is some blurring of the lines between 2 and 3. Had I ordered the list by amount of polish rather than word share, I would have flipped them. I could also have subdivided number 3 into essay collections calling that call themselves “digital gardens” and those that do not, but they are all more similar in content than they are different in style, so lumped they were.

Many authors of Number 3 blogs-not-blogs are amusing for their insistence on having other people read their work before they post it. They like to thank them in a post-scriptum, doing the double work of name-dropping and seeding future links. Here is Nabeel Qureshi doing it last week; there you see Paul Graham also thanking a bunch of people, some of them the same.

This approach writing on the internet goes hand-in-hand with the call for quality over quantity: better to polish your one big piece for months than churn out articles week after week without any of them having much chance of being widely read. Wrong assumptions aside, ⊕ And here is the aside: people who espouse this view take it for granted that the chief reason why someone would post their writing online is for it to be read widely, or if not widely then at least by people of influence. That is writing in order to be read. An alternative framing — my framing, in fact — is that writing is beneficial for its own sake, to develop thoughts, keep records and improve speed, and if someone online has any benefit from seeing what you did and/or has good comments, then great. But ultimately the main audience for my writing are the future me-s. quality over quantity in online writing leads to inevitable slowdown and year-long pauses, to no-one’s benefit. My RSS reader is full of dead feeds that started out this way; see: Applied Divinity Studies (last posted December 2022), Fantastic Anachronism (last posted February 2023), Everything Studies (last posted January 2024, after a year-long break).

John Nerst, the author of Everything Studies has a good excuse — he is writing a book — but then so were Tyler Cowen, M. John Harrison, Allan Jacobs and many others closer to the stream-of-thought school. Would not the period of research and writing be the perfect time to share some of the thoughts and drafts with others?

And here we come to the paradox of going for quality-over-quantity when writing-to-be-read. If nothing you write is good enough to be posted, it will never be read. If you’re fine writing in any and all circumstances and sharing posts that are just good-enough-for-government-work, well, the area under the curve of your stuff being red over time will only increase. It’s the roundaboutness of blogging.