If you haven’t yet read an explainer on “AI”, I consider Jeremiah Lowin’s “An Intuitive Guide to How LLMs Work” to be a good one.
In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt describes work by William Damon at Stanford that sought “to see why some professions seemed healthy while others were growing sick”:
Picking the fields of genetics and journalism as case studies, they conducted dozens of interviews with people in each field. Their conclusion is as profound as it is simple: It’s a matter of alignment. When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a field is healthy.
In their study, modern journalists were suffering in the era of market consolidation and the growing attention economy:
Many journalists who worked for these empires confessed to having a sense of being forced to sell out and violate their own moral standards. Their world was unaligned, and they could not become vitally engaged in the larger but ignoble mission of gaining market share at any cost.
Contrast that with genetics, where doing good and doing well are usually the same thing.
Decide if you think being a healthcare worker in the now-typical corporatized environment reflects a coherent or incoherent profession. This is essentially the premise behind the “moral injury” reframing of physician burnout.
Unfortunately, recognition doesn’t really help because reclaiming coherence is hard:
A coherent profession, such as genetics, can get on with the business of genetics, while an incoherent profession, like journalism, spends a lot of time on self-analysis and self-criticism. Most people know there’s a problem, but they can’t agree on what to do about it.
Or, “Why Independent Radiology is different from most job boards (but also still boring)”
So recently I created a simple, small website called Independent Radiology. It’s a boring job board, but it’s also different from most job boards.
Jason Fried from 37signals (makers of Basecamp, HEY, and other stuff) argued years ago that software should be opinionated. A random WordPress website isn’t software per se, but I feel as a random dude on the internet with a full-time job, family, writing avocation, etc that anything extra worth doing in this sphere is only worth doing if it’s going to help someone and is unabashedly done the way I would do it. It’s a project that reflects my biases, preferences, and mission. It’s idiosyncratic. It’s opinionated.
The Context
When I first thought seriously about the issues with the ACR job board earlier this year that inspired this project (now significantly improved, you’re welcome), I was partly irritated by disingenuous job listings from Radiology Partners that were masquerading as independent private practices. But I was also struck by several things:
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More fun from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. In case you missed it, we started with happy nihilism through cosmic insignificance theory and acknowledging the trap of productivity.
More on that inescapable finitude:
And it means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed.
That cuts.
Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves: from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets and family networks that used to help ease the burdens of work and childcare; and from the sexist expectation that women must excel in their careers while assuming most of the responsibilities at home. None of that will be solved by self-help alone; as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes in a widely shared essay on millennial burnout, you can’t fix such problems “with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or ‘anxiety baking,’ or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.”
So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in.
I do like overnight oats though.
The more efficient you get, the more you become “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,” in the words of the management expert Jim Benson.
“A limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations” is a great line.
As she recalls in her memoir The Iceberg, the British sculptor Marion Coutts was taking her two-year-old son to his first day with a new caregiver when her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock, came to find her to tell her about the malignant brain tumor from which he was to die within three years:
Something has happened. A piece of news. We have had a diagnosis that has the status of an event. The news makes a rupture with what went before: clean, complete and total, save in one respect. It seems that after the event, the decision we make is to remain. Our [family] unit stands … We learn something. We are mortal. You might say you know this but you don’t. The news falls neatly between one moment and another. You would not think there was a gap for such a thing … It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, You will lose everything that catches your eye.
Which is a devastating way to come to the realization.
And, finally, most importantly, JOMO:
The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.” It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything. In this state of mind, you can embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead—earn money to support your family, write your novel, bathe the toddler, pause on a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk—is how you’ve chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect.
From Paul Graham’s “The Right Kind of Stubborn:”
The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it.
Worse still, that means they’ll tend to be attached to their first ideas about how to solve a problem, even though these are the least informed by the experience of working on it. So the obstinate aren’t merely attached to details, but disproportionately likely to be attached to wrong ones.
I like this distinction.
In some ways, Graham’s distinction between persistence and obstinance feels analogous to experts and “experts” (or, perhaps more fairly, between continuous growth and brittle skill).
There are people for whom expertise is partially a mindset: they question assumptions, their approach, and their knowledge. They want to be challenged, and they want to learn, and they want to improve.
And then there are those for whom expertise is a status. Their identity is tied to having the answers, and they know the right way to do things.
It’s a bit of a false dichotomy. People can be both obstinate and persistent in different contexts.
But if you’re overly rigid in your work or competing approaches feel like threats, you’re probably being too precious. Your excuse for doing things a certain way in the face of better alternatives probably shouldn’t be “It’s the way I learned how to do it,” or “That’s the way I’ve always done it.”
An interesting essay by Leopold Aschenbrenner discussing the recent history of as well predictions for the next 10 years of AI: “From GPT-4 to AGI”
A long but good read, which itself is part of an even longer series.
It may just be the marketing, but the newly announced DC-1 tablet from Daylight seems poised to scratch an itch of our times. As summarized by Om Malik:
What the company has created is a beautiful tablet— about the size of a normal iPad Air. It is just a “little less than white,” white, with a gorgeous screen. It is very simple, elegant, and lovely. It has an e-ink like screen, and the matte monochrome paper-like display is optimized for reading, writing, and note-taking. It refreshes at 60 frames per second, a pretty big deal for these kind of displays.
I love at least the idea of this.
Complaining about modern technology, addictive software, and the ills of social media can be is tiresome. But it’s also a real, difficult-to-mitigate problem. So I hope this forthcoming thing works as advertised and becomes a commercial success.
And I would love to see this company, on the heels of that success, expand their offerings to additional form factors (the phone being the obvious next choice) or prove the market enough to inspire more mature companies to enter whatever the term for these “deliberate computing” or “modernized retro” or “neo-vintage” or “tech nostalgist” concepts should be.
Nothing currently available has really done the trick. Even the cheapest FreeWrite devices are comically expensive as an isolated electronic typewriter with extremely small displays, and devices like the reMarkable also have a (purposefully) narrow, limiting use case.
The closest thing would be the tablets by Boox, which have good and pretty fast e-ink screens but don’t quite achieve the advertised frame rate here (which if true would be fast enough to function like a regular monitor), feel just a tad underpowered, and don’t have the fun (if potentially gimmicky?) Amber backlight. I actually have a Boox Palma, which is an awesome little phone-sized version of what the DC-1 should bascially turn out to be minus the stylus support, and it’s overall fantastic. It’s a convenient form factor for reading, runs customized Android so Kindle, Libby, and many other apps all work perfectly, and can do the internet and anything else a phone or tablet can do (minus the phone itself). The screen really is pretty fast (you can technically watch a video in grayscale, though not particularly well), and the backlight temperature can be tuned to a slightly warm color for dark environments. Still, it’s just the slightest bit slow such that no one could mistake it for a truly normal computer with a magic screen.
While Boox has made some solid devices, if the DC-1 can run its customized Android system as well and quickly as in the demos, it might function as the productivity and consumption machine for writing, reading, and potentially drawing that the iPad and other tablets have largely failed to achieve due to either not being able to do enough or simultaneously way too much. Maybe this finds the sweet spot.
As a parent with pre-phone-age children, I would love to see more entries in the not-quite-so-smart phone pantheon. There are things I love about modern phones that make using a purposely old-school device too limiting: maps, streaming music, audiobooks, e-books, email (sigh), and yes, sometimes the Internet. Also a top-notch camera (must. take. photos. of. kids). A future world where there are good phones with paper-like aesthetics combined with a curated but powerful productivity and consumption suite of apps would be great.
Here’s a mini-documentary that describes how the new “LivePaper” display works compared with regular e-ink:
The world's first 60+ FPS e-ink display by @daylightco on Episode 45 of S³
See how it works, the 6-year development journey, and Daylight's vision for the future of personal computing. pic.twitter.com/s8DK0iLA1Y
— Jason Carman (@jasonjoyride) May 25, 2024
Sometimes it’s the right features—not more features—that make a new product worth it.
Yesterday, the FTC passed its proposed ban on noncompetes along party lines.
This is not a done deal. The US Chamber of Commerce (which is a large lobbying organization, not a part of the government) intends to sue immediately, and they won’t be alone. Among other complaints, the Republican members of the committee who voted against it and the future litigants do not believe the FTC has the authority to do this.
The FTC’s final rule—including a very long full discussion of their rationale and authority—is here.
One of the exceptions of interest to those following consolidation in healthcare:
The final rule does not apply to non-competes entered into by a person pursuant to a bona fide sale of a business entity.
The original proposal had a limitation to the sale exception that defined a “substantial owner, substantial member, and substantial partner” to “mean an owner, member, or partner holding at least a 25 percent ownership interest in a business entity.”
The final rule does not require the seller to have a minimum ownership stake for the exception to apply.
This presumably means that, for example, all doctors who sell their practices to private equity are still bound by their noncompetes, regardless of practice size. (Non-legacy “partners” who weren’t partners at the time of sale would be free).
The new rule, if it survives, will be retroactive to essentially all noncompetes starting on the effective date ~120 days from now.
The FTC has argued it has authority over at least some nonprofits here. They bookend their argument thusly:
The final rule applies to the full scope of the Commission’s jurisdiction. Many of the comments about nonprofits erroneously assume that the FTC’s jurisdiction does not capture any entity claiming tax-exempt status as a nonprofit. Given these comments, the Commission summarizes Commission precedent and judicial decisions construing the scope of the Commission’s jurisdiction as it relates to entities that claim tax-exempt status as nonprofits and to other entities that may or may not be organized to carry on business for their own profit or the profit of their members.
[…]
The Commission stresses, however, that both judicial decisions and Commission precedent recognize that not all entities claiming tax-exempt status as nonprofits fall outside the Commission’s jurisdiction.
See pages 50-54 of the final rule above for their argument regarding jurisdiction over nonprofits.
The only true exceptions to the ban are senior executives and the bona fide sale provision.
The press release is here.
If you have HBO Max, standup comic Alex Edelman’s one-man show was excellent. The official description of its main narrative thread: “In the wake of a string of anti–Semitic threats pointed in his direction online, standup comic Alex Edelman decides to go straight to the source; specifically, Queens, where he covertly attends a meeting of White Nationalists.” Here’s the trailer.