Merriam-Webster: Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.. A year behind the times, no? Although, same could be said about Oxford’s. eryney marrogi: This paper is being interpreted as something it isnt.. The paper in question being about AI-designed super-proteins, with claims of the proteins' supremacy being somewhat overstated, particularly by the perennial AI alarmist whom Marrogi quote-tweets. Although the thought of humans creating new super-stable proteins by any means, LLM or no LLM, does give me heartburn.

Infrastructure weekend continues. After changing the fonts, I have decided to simplify the color scheme and (finally!) change the name of the blog from micro.blog’s default, which was my own name, to the “Infinite Regress” heading. My name standing there in big bold letters looked a bit too self-promotional. Of course, that means that there are now two Infinite Regress blogs — here is the old one — but I guess I will have to reconcile that some other time.

Scott Sumner: The Great Depression: Elevator pitch. Wherein Sumner outlines his book on the Great Depression, The Midas Paradox, which I haven’t read but is now on the pile. Even just the outline has brought my level of understanding from zero to a vague sense of what went wrong. Ernie Smith: Compartmentalizing. I knew about the shipping container revolution before reading this brief history on Tedium, but I forgot just how much ships themselves transformed to accommodate the new invention to the point of being overoptimized.

The future of the web depends on simple, open standards.