Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand how to live. “An AI future of sleek, streamlined, and totally empty relationships.” Elizabeth Lopatto shreds Zuck’s AI manifesto. “Look, I am coming to believe we need a better quality of AI booster…. Is the point of life merely to stockpile accomplishments? If that is what Silicon Valley believes, no wonder all the billionaires seem so unhappy all the time!”

Why you can’t find a primary care doctor. Prevention isn’t a priority in US healthcare. The profit is in damage control. Why should healthcare providers invest in primary care physicians to help you lose weight, eat healthy and get fit when there is so much money to be made in prescription meds and heart surgery?

On AI Coding and Its Discontents.

Cal Newport says the honeymoon phase of AI coding is over. Early advocates of using AI to write code are scaling back their ambitions. Turns out AI-generated code is often buggy, hard to fix and hard to maintain. Coders are still using AI in their work, but in controlled and limited ways. “AI is not a magic ‘infinity machine’ that can solve all our problems, and ultimately deliver us a sense of meaning in a cold, confusing world. It’s a normal technology, and perhaps it’s time we start talking about it that way.”

Bobby Brainworms comes to San Diego to make homelessness remediation as successful as the war in Iran and fixing the reflecting pool.

Anthropic will watermark text and other file types to identify AI-generated content. I’m intrigued by how that would work in text — seems impossible.

I loved the movie “Up In the Air,” starring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick as contractors who break the bad news to employees during corporate layoffs.

I saw it the night I was laid off from a job. It was, I think, my second time being laid off, not my first. The first time you’re laid off it’s traumatic. After that — the second, and subsequent occasions — you’re like yeah sure whatever just tell me about my severance and COBRA.

Also, I have been a frequent business traveler nearly all of my career (though nowhere near as frequent as George Clooney’s character).

Bluesky’s active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app. X is shrinking too but Threads is growing.

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” — Harry S Truman

Breaking out the dino undies? She must be really special.

I spent a few minutes on the Democratic Socialists of America website, paying particular attention to their platform. Much of it is aspirational and utopian and entirely agreeable. This is the world we’d like to see in 25, 50 or 100 years, not necessarily tomorrow. However t...

I updated the template for my newsletter to set the maximum width for the body to 600 pixels, so the newsletter doesn’t stretch alllllllll the way across a widescreen. I had Claude do the code and it appeared to get it right in one shot, which is too good to be true.

If you’re reading this in the newsletter and the formatting is funny, please let me know. And if the newsletter is so badly formatted that you can’t read it, well, I hope my attempt at mental telepathy is working.

Shared privately by a friend, who says, “A valid and rational response. Smart kid. Looks into the abyss and averts his eyes.”

This is cool: The cast of “The Pitt” will do a live table reading of the first broadcast episode of “Star Trek” to celebrate the show’s 60th anniversary and benefit the Writers' Guild Foundation. Noah Wylie will play Kirk, and other cast participating include Katherine LaNasa, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Shabana Azeez and Ayesha Harris

We missed the San Diego Carnivorous Plant Society Sale and Show. It was last weekend. Darnit!

In other news: San Diego has a carnivorous plant society. Is it a society of carnivorous plants?

If there’s a movie based on a book, and you plan to both see the movie and read the book, what order should you do it in?

I think most readers would say you should read the book first, but a friend makes a compelling, brief argument for seeing the movie first: the book will have so much more to it than the movie. You watch the movie to get the broad strokes and read the book the appreciate the details.

With “Project Hail Mary,” I did something I don’t think I’ve ever done before: I read about half of the book, then watched the movie, then read the rest of the book. I loved the movie, thought parts of the book were great but much of it was “meh.”

Parts the novel “Project Hail Mary,” by Andy Weir, were compelling and even moving. Those were the parts that involve interactions with the characters and advancing the plot, particularly the warm friendship that grows between the human hero and alien Rocky. I found the spec...

I use semicolons anyway. Give the motherfuckers reading my shitposts an edumacation. Yes to this

YouTube has been serving me clips of scenes where bullies push the hero Too Far.

YouTube gets me.

Billy Jack is even worse than I remember it. So bad. I love it

This scene from “Nobody 2," starring Bob Odenkirk, actually looks pretty good.

The GOAT: “I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me!"

A new Robert Charles Wilson time travel novel? Yes, please.

Cover looks great. Has a nice Saul Bass vibe.

Arsenic and Lace: The trial of the Yorkshire Witch. The true tale of Mary Bateman, the villainous Yorkshire Witch, who sold spells and enchantments to the desperate in the late 18th Century. Tim Hartford is joined on the Cautionary Tales podcast by Maddy Pelling, co-host of the After Dark podcast and author of “Hoax: Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment.”

My TV these days is deeply middle-aged. Reruns of Buffy, Stargate, Grimm, The Mentalist, Justified, Inspector Morse and the occasional Golden Girls episode. Last night, we watched the series finale of Grantchester.

I think maybe the only new show we’re currently watching is “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” which is essentially a reboot of a TV series that debuted midway through the Johnson Administration.

My TV these days is deeply middle-aged. Reruns of Buffy, Stargate, Grimm, The Mentalist, Justified, Inspector Morse and the occasional Golden Girls episode. Last night, we watched the series finale of Grantchester.

I think maybe the only new show we’re currently watching is “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” which is essentially a reboot of a TV series that debuted midway through the Johnson Administration.

2001 profile of Vernor Vinge, the brilliant science fiction writer and computer scientist. By Katie Hafner at The New York Times: A linchpin of his thinking is what he calls the “technological singularity,” a point at which the intelligence of machines takes a huge leap, an...

I read three print books and have no big thoughts about it.

I have done nearly all my book reading as ebooks since 2010. However, I was unable to find ebook versions of the “Funny Papers” trilogy by Tom De Haven, so I bought print versions.

The experience reading print books after years of electronically was … fine.

It confirmed I prefer ebooks, not for any grand philosophical or esthetic reason, but just because they’re more convenient.

But faced with the same choice again — wanting to read a book that is not available as an ebook — I’ll get the print book in an instant.

Tom De Haven’s Funny Papers trilogy is a sprawling, picaresque romp through the lives and neuroses of the men responsible for creating a wildly popular comic strip over a period spanning more than a century. The first novel in the series, “Funny Papers” tells the story of G...

In Finland, as in the US, new parents get a package of freebies. In the US, it’s “an underwhelming package: a small drawstring bag containing a few tiny samples of baby shampoo and diaper cream, and tons of coupons.” But in Finland, it’s different, acccording to 99% Invisible:

[In Finland], they get a large cardboard box full of supplies for a newborn and its parents: items like picture books, nipple cream and warm booties for the freezing Finnish winters. The box itself even doubles as a crib. It’s a starter kit of everything a family will need for the first six months of a baby’s life, and virtually every new parent in Finland is eligible to receive one.

… in its almost 90 years of existence, the Finnish baby box has evolved from a basic survival tool to a national symbol, a rite of passage– and possibly the cutest social engineering tool in the world.

Stephenson: I’m not an expert on how the brain works, but I can say that, when writing by hand, one is continually solving a series of small problems having to do with the spacing of words, how letters are connected, the crossing of the letter t (sometimes more than one in ...