Monday links, books attached Monopolized by David Dayen, which Cory Doctorow recommended in response to my account from last week of the medical billing/phone scam rabbit-duck. Doctorow wrote about the book in more detail back in 2021 and yes it is now on the pile as is everything else below. The Credibility Crisis in Science ⊕ ↬ Joel Hamill by Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer, and if the subtitle “Tweakers, Fraudsters, and the Manipulation of Empirical Results” whets your appetite there is an excerpt available in Nautilus. The Art of Manliness by Brett and Kate McKay, who have had a blog of the same name for more than a decade, so it is a true mystery why an article in The Dispatch about the “gentlemanosphere” ⊕ ↬ Reader John chose to highlight overtestosteroned almost-douchebags such as Scott Galloway as the anti-manosphere crusaders rather than McKay. Haha, I’m joking, of course it’s not a mystery: Galloway gets more clicks, taps, swipes or rather the preferred method of interaction is nowadays. He also has a new book out, to which I shall not link. The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Christopher Ricks, which someone recommended on The Honest Broker Podcast, a show that combines some of my least favorite things about this decade: Substack and using the word “podcast” to describe a video of two men talking. Still, the transcript makes for good reading and the book seems something worth keeping at the bedside, at least aspirationally.

Monday links, books attached: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/20/monday-links-...

📚 Finished reading: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, so I now have no choice but to watch Blade Runner for the fourth or fifth time. I suspect that — much like with the novel — quite a few parts will “hit different” this time around.

Text reads The non-Jokić minutes turn game in a serif font. The “ć” sticks out in size and typeface.

Infinite Regress is not a professional outlet yet even this here half-brained bozo knows better than to mix fonts in a single word. They should have shaved off the “ć” to a “c” if their house headline typeface didn’t have the right diacritic, but then why doesn’t it?

And hey, congrats to Denver!

Friday links, everything but a blog post edition Bayesian Workflow, a new book from Andrew Gelman et al, coming out in June. Here is Gelman’s announcement and here is the book’s web page. The Alba Madonna, ⊕ ᔥ Tyler Cowen a painting of Raphael’s at the National Gallery of Art, which you can examine in detail on their website. The Classical Station, ⊕ ᔥ William Parker a no-nonsense, no-tracking stream of human-selected music. Here is their daily playlist. just the fracking QR code, ⊕ ᔥ Jahir Fiquitiva on Mastodon a no-nonsense, no tracking website that will give you the QR image for any text, file or hex code you desire. Jellyfin, a home media server which resembles Plex before it was enshittified. Note that (1) I am yet to try it out and (2) the person whom I first saw mention it does not in fact endorse it.

Friday links, everything but a blog post edition: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/17/friday-links-...

A black frame encases a broken section of drywall, titled Fragile Masculinity with a note from an anonymous artist dated 10-31-21.

As seen in the restroom of our favorite non-seafood restaurant in all of Eastern Shore, The Irish Penny Pub and Grill in Salisbury, MD. It’s the perfect pit stop on the way to the beach, but really I’d drive 2.5 hours from DC just for their boxty.

If it walks like a scam and talks like a scam, maybe it is your hospital's billing department For reasons that will soon become apparent, I would like to share with you a joke I heard back at medical school. I will remind you that this was in Belgrade, Serbia in the early 2000s, but the joke would apply to any Serbian institution of higher education, or indeed any place anywhere in the world that uses oral exams I have heard these called viva voce in the US, which is a bafflingly cheerful-sounding name for a rather traumatic ordeal. to determine the final grade. Please also bear in mind that I am not the best at telling jokes.

If it walks like a scam and talks like a scam, maybe it is your hospital's billing department: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/15/if-it-walks-l...

Infinite Regress 🍿 It Chapter Two (2019) was a tad too long and a bit of a drag, because adulthood is a drag and we are seeing the kids all grown up. What would have worked much better is if the modern-day scenes were interspersed with the 1980s so that we learn about the story as the adults remembered it. Brilliant idea, I know.

🍿 It Chapter Two (2019) was a tad too long and a bit of a drag, because adulthood is a drag and we are seeing the kids all grown up. What would have worked much better is if the modern-day scenes were interspersed with the 1980s so that... blog.miljko.org/2026/04/14/it-chapter-tw...

Apple decoupling update: the written word Having switched to Linux for 90% of my computing, I realized Emacs could cover much of those 90%: mu4e for email org-mode for project management Denote for slipbox-styled notes I have followed the Zettelkasten blog since its early days but have somehow missed out that they were big proponents of Emacs. Here is a talk Christian Tietez of the Zettelkasten blog had at EmacsConf 2025, which is how I learned about Denote. A custom micro.blog client, Microbe, for blog post management A custom Inkwell client, Inkling, for reading RSS feeds And for all my kvetching about how ugly Emacs can be, this was in fact a me problem and not an Emacs problem. It took 8 lines of code and downloading some decent fonts for things to look much better.

Apple decoupling update: the written word: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/13/apple-decoupl...

Five birds are perched on a branch surrounded by vibrant green leaves.

А whole flock of cedar waxwings decided to perch on the courtyard redbud tree right outside our window. It’s times like this that make me chuck the phone and get back to my ancient Nikon DSLR.

Happy Easter!
Христос васкрсе!

The shameless style in American business Cory Doctorow wrote this morning about a short-lived business venture of his from the late 1990s that, during a brainstorming session, invented SEO slop years before either of those two terms became widely known. That train of thought didn’t go anywhere — they weren’t sociopaths — but it made him realize an important life fact: The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn’t their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks.

The shameless style in American business: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/11/the-shameless...

A scoreboard displays a basketball game score of 121-99, with a dance or halftime activity featuring a mascot throwing a hot dog shown on the large screens above the court.

🏀 Scenes from the last Wizards home game. Appropriate ending to an ignominious season.

(Not so) Good Friday links Matt Novak on Bluesky: “Let’s talk about tonight…”. Behold the banality of evil. Scott Sumner: The odd disappearance of the business cycle. In which an economist wonders why everyone is so down on the economy when the numbers tell us that we live in financial nirvana. Well I can think of a few reasons thanks to Kyla Scanlon’s newsletter. Her “Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy” from December 2025 addresses Sumner’s confusion head on. Joan Westenberg: Why I quit “The Strive”. Westenberg doesn’t call it that, but she describes the founder trap — a funhouse mirror version of the upper middle class trap. Indeed, her article fits neatly into Wednesday’s congames. Adam Ruben for Science: Cite unseen: when AI hallucinates scientific articles. The preeminent scientific journal discovers hallucinations. The moral is that those who ask Kenneth the page to write their dissertation deserve everything they get. Bonus: Little Snitch for Linux. An OG MacOS app now has a proper Linux version. May it be a sign of things to come.

(Not so) Good Friday links: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/10/not-so-good-f...

A pond reflecting surrounding trees under a clear blue sky.

Early spring is the best time to be at the Tregaron Conservancy: all of the foliage without any of the mosquitos. Yes it was the NIMBY mindset that protected this piece of land from developers, but it wouldn’t be the first time crying out NIMBY was the right thing to do.








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It (2017 film) - Wikipedia

🍿 It (2017) — the rare remake that is infinitely better than the original miniseries, and (together with the sequel) the second-best Stephen King horror story adaptation. Granted, it is not a high bar to jump over as they all tend to be stinkers.

Wednesday links, congames edition Venkatesh Rao: On Cooling America Out. Rao is back and in rare form, expanding on a 1952 paper about conmen and their victims. In the process, he describes a leg of the American elephant not often discussed: The US is something of a clueless striver culture of idealistic innocents who believe themselves to be worldly and cunning, based on a bewildering stack of ludicrous mythologies ranging from the personal-scale “American Dream” to the various eras of American Exceptionalism. This is true even of the macho idealism of the right.

Wednesday links, congames edition: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/08/wednesday-lin...

It – Welcome to Derry - Wikipedia

📺 It: Welome to Derry (2025) had more hits than misses, even while comitting the cardinal sin of prequels which is to overexplain. There is gore, of course, all CGI and gamified to the point of being camp. It is just as well: the greatest horror remains in the anticipation of the unseen.

Choice comments to Presidentissimo Trump's warning that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" from that bastion of liberal media, Fox News “A whole civilisation will be destroyed - what an appalling way for a president to talk. Future generations - if we survive will look back and ask how this president could have remained in office. Either Article 25 or impeachment must be exercised.” (👍 339, 👎 117) “Textbook definition of a terrorist: If I can’t have my way, then I will blow up stuff.” (👍 330, 👎 99) “Independent Christian and I am actually ashamed of my vote for Trump at this point. His post are vile, childish and disgraceful at every level. He is a tarnish on our nation. He WILL NEVER BE A Reagan…..” (👍 117, 👎 22)

Choice comments to Presidentissimo Trump's warning that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" from that bastion of liberal media, Fox News: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/07/choice-commen...

Monday night links, multimedial Reddit video: Artemis ll launch from Kennedy Space Center seen from an United Airlines flight. Better than anything you could have seen from NASA. YouTube video: Hanged by a comma. The whole channel is wonderful! (ᔥMiraz Jordan) Podcast audio: Slice of GTD Life with Scott Adams. Of course generative AI would come for our to-do lists. Web comic: Groan up. I have been following Wondermark for almost two decades and I’m glad David Malki is back at it. The most recent one was 👌 Reddit screenshot: Notable Seattle-based travel writer and millionaire, Rick Steves, voices his thoughts on new “Millionaire Tax”. I have loved Rick Steves since around 2008 when I held his guide to Italy like a bible during a 1-month trip. I now love him even more. Web log: MVP thoughts. This is from Doc Searls, who makes a beautiful case for Tyrese Haliburton being this season’s MVP despite not playing a single game. The most informative experiments are ones where you take a single thing away.

Monday night links, multimedial: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/06/monday-night-...

Infinite Regress Today I learned of the More Perfect Union channel on YouTube and I cannot stop watching. It is like investigative journalism never died and the younger generations somehow carried the flame I thought extinguished under the deluge of talking cable TV heads. It would have been even more perfect without the clickbaity made-for-YouTube thumbnails and video titles but if that is what it takes to keep it afloat it is a small price to pay.

Today I learned of the More Perfect Union channel on YouTube and I cannot stop watching. It is like investigative journalism never died and the younger generations somehow carried the flame I thought extinguished under the deluge of t... blog.miljko.org/2026/04/05/today-i-learn...

🍿 Svadba (2026) was a competently executed, fun, and a tad crass romp. The only thing that can unite the Balkans is clearly love and mockery of corrupt transnational elites.

A brightly decorated metro train with floral patterns and the phrase “All lines lead to bloom” is seen with passengers inside.

Spring has so arrived even the metro trains are in bloom.

Friday links, in loving solidarity Scott Sumner: Too good to be true. Sumner has a PhD in economics and a storied academic career but you don’t need either to confirm his observation that Congress punishes savers and rewards spendthrifts. And in that they are merely following the current animal spirits of the country: behold credit scores plummeting when you pay off your mortgage. Cui bono? Joan Westenberg: The “Passive Income” trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs. Certainly not the poor shmucks setting up yet another Amazon enshitiffier dropshipping storefront. As Westenberg points out, far worse than their job of enshittifying my online shopping experience is the opportunity cost: what could have these would-be entrepreneurs done had they not paid $1,000 for a get-rich-quick course? And if you liked that article, do see her [Notes on going solo][2a]. The mind bristles with possible applications for a solo practice. Aidan Walker: what would Whitman do?. And what could possibly be more American than a solo practice? After all, it is a country that emphasizes individuality over the communal for better or worse. But of course culture changes all the time and as eternal as this state of affairs seems to have been, Walker reminds us that it is no older than the second half of the 20th century. Before then, and certainly in the time of Lincoln, the themes were: Nature worship, creative self-assertion, and loving solidarity. This mystic trinity is the foundation of American democracy, which was really founded by Lincoln and not Washington. Liberalism is something they invented in Europe.

Friday links, in loving solidarity: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/03/friday-links-...

Blog infrastructure updates Goodbye, Feedly. Now that Inkwell has soft-launched OPML sync ⊕ If you are a Premium user of micro.blog, go to the Account page and click the “OPML Sync…” button in the Feed subscriptions section. It asks for the URL of the OPML file you would like to sync with, though from my experiments “Sync” is a bit of a misnomer as it will only add the RSS feeds it finds there that you don’t yet have on Inkwell but it doesn’t remove the ones that are on Inkwell but not in the syncing OPML. I can go back to FeedLand as my source of RSS feed subscription truth. This also means that my blogroll is due for a makeover. Would it not be much better if I could show the most recent posts for each recommended feed, FeedLand-style?

Blog infrastructure updates: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/02/blog-infrastr...

Wednesday links, Substack all-stars Lily Lynch: Birthday Baffler. This is little more than a call-out to her article Yugoslavia Calling, about the world’s first Internet war(s). Well, it’s one more thing: a note that today is Lynch’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Lily! Branko Milanović: Yuri Andropov: A man who could have become another Deng Xiaoping…or not. Leave it to Milanović to write an engrossing, educational and highly relevant review of a 40-year-old book. His own Capitalism, Alone from 2019 has also aged quite well. Bryan Vartabedian: Three Bottlenecks in Healthcare Delivery. Ah, we have come to the AI section of the link list. This one is about creating abundance in health care and all I could think of while reading the article was the Isaac Asimov quote from 1953: “It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem.” Adam Mastroianni: Infinite midwit. The titular midwit is your friendly neighborhood LLM, because Mastroianni shares my observations about the ChatGPT style of writing. As a semi-professional writer, he is more relieved that he won’t be out of work any time soon than frustrated that he keeps encountering dreck. Oh well. Ruxandra Teslo: The Bureaucracy Blocking the Chance at a Cure. Teslo asks for more abundance. The Asimov quote a few bullet points up still stands, though it is only a matter of degree that is unknown: we know full well what kind of shenanigans releasing the brakes on early-stage trials would unleash. Again, letting China do it would be a sign of maturity. Kyla Scanlon: The Ozempicization of the Economy. I don’t know which part of this hot-take smorgasbord I liked more: Scanlon’s digs at the “prediction” “markets”, her overview of “The Manosphere” (I watched the first 10 minutes of Theroux’s documentary and promptly turned it off as it was little different from watching the actual TikTok videos), or her observations on the most recent war. So, I will only re-quote one MG Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, who per Scanlon tweeted (confusing em-dash spacing included): We are aware of what is happening in the paper oil market, including the firms hired to influence oil futures. We also see the broader jawboning campaign. But let’s see if they can turn that into “actual fuel” at the pump —or maybe even print gas molecules!

Wednesday links, Substack all-stars: blog.miljko.org/2026/04/01/wednesday-lin...

Infinite Regress 🍿 The Thin Man (1934) was fun to watch, even with the wooden acting from everyone but the lead characters. Nick and Nora inspired so many other murder mysteries and action comedies that a reboot is only a matter of time, and indeed Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt’s production companies were considering it. I imagine their functional alcoholism will play differently these days.

🍿 The Thin Man (1934) was fun to watch, even with the wooden acting from everyone but the lead characters. Nick and Nora inspired so many other murder mysteries and action comedies that a reboot is only a matter of time, and indeed Marg... blog.miljko.org/2026/03/31/the-thin-man-...

Monday links, five colons and a pipe Ernie Smith for Tedium: Self-Hosting: Still Worth It?. For some this will be a costly read — and yet still worth it. Chris Arnade: Japan: America’s Best Ally? Yelling “Takaichi!” while holding up both thumbs will be my go-to way for getting out of uncomfortable conversations. Aishwarya Khanduja and Stuart Buck: The Economy of Knowing: Why Metascience Needs Micro and Macro. At what point does it stop being metascience and becomes applied economics? When you start calling it “macro”, says I. Andrew Gelman: Why and how to do Bayes for clinical trials: Our comments on the recent FDA draft guidance, and reactions to two comments by others. People are flabbergasted that the FDA came out with a sensible proposal. Anna Moore: Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion. Ben Thompson was the proverbial canary for LLM delusions and Microsoft did him a favor when they nerfed Sydney. The Back Focus channel on YouTube: Jim Downey, the Character Actor? | Acting Breakdown. The title is, of course, a play on “Jeff Epstein, the New York financier”, the viewing of which may be the best 2 minutes 16 seconds you will spend today.

Monday links, five colons and a pipe: blog.miljko.org/2026/03/30/monday-links-...

21 Jump Street (film) - Wikipedia

🍿 21 Jump Street (2012) was fun, but its main effect was to make me want to rewatch Hot Fuzz.

Infinite Regress 🍿 The End of the Tour (2015) made David Foster Wallace less handsome — with apologies to Jason Segel — but also less neurotic and more comfortable to watch. For comparison, here is an interview with the real DFW done around the same time the movie portrays, which I dare you to watch without cringing. DFW was an introspection machine, to our benefit and his own detriment, the self-destructed proof that the unexamined life is more viable.

🍿 The End of the Tour (2015) made David Foster Wallace less handsome — with apologies to Jason Segel — but also less neurotic and more comfortable to watch. For comparison, here is an interview with the real DFW done around the same time... blog.miljko.org/2026/03/28/the-end-of-th...

Portrait of Jamie Dimon at the National Portrait Gallery, next to a quote from him and the portrait artist.

America's new national heroes: blog.miljko.org/2026/03/27/americas-new-...

Infinite Regress 🍿 Project Hail Mary (2026) was the perfect family movie that pushed all the right buttons. Message: good things are good, bad things are bad, knowledge is power. Tone: earnest friendship and collaboration over cynicism and bickering. Visuals: Dune-level cinematography with many practical effects and no CGI-generated characters in sight. Sound: I don’t know which I enjoyed more, the soundtrack or the score. Yes, you should go see it, even if you haven’t read the book.

🍿 Project Hail Mary (2026) was the perfect family movie that pushed all the right buttons.

Message: good things are good, bad things are bad, knowledge is power.
Tone: earnest friendship and collaboration over cynicism and bickeri... blog.miljko.org/2026/03/27/project-hail-...