There's a certain trendy kind of "travel" that amounts to checking off a list of famous places where you have been physical present. I think you'd grow as a person more by staying home and watching YouTube explainers with drone footage.

Friends told me recently I would benefit from being more confrontational on social media. 1) I find this extremely amusing 2) I do not know how to go about that productively.

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

I really admire the IFP people's strategy of working on things getting a middling level of attention (can't remember where I heard one say this). Too little attention makes change impossible. Too much and partisanship determines policy. I worry energy now gets too much attention

I never knew Gab well, but her loss is a huge misfortune. I hope everyone will be there for Charles and everyone else she impacted. There were many, and it's clear she was one of a kind.

Example 375926 of why regulations (and law in general) should take as targeted a form as possible. Don't ban bright headlights. Ban headlights that cause accidents!

About 85% of students at 4 year institutions attend a college that admits more than half its applicants. Stop worrying about the admissions criteria of the top half dozen. That whole discussion is just status anxiety.

Blaming phones for social ills is uninformative until you specify a mechanism. Lower relative cost of solo entertainment? Lower relative cost of non-face-to-face interactions? Stream of unachieved aspirational comparison figures? Stream of panic and doom culture?

I am still thinking about how creepy "Liz Warren has a plan for you" was

The only reason I can think of not to drop "conservative" from all descriptors of the American right and just call them "populists" (or even "fascists", in unfortunately many cases) is that there is a populist group on the left, also.

LLMs are weirder than we think with all sorts of complex implications that we don’t fully understand.

Nowadays contrastive apposition isn't just associated with AI - it's completely unusable.

I would probably pay for a gene therapy to take away the cilantro soap gene from my tongue. It's surprisingly hard to remember to ask places not to chop soap bits over your food.

There's a sense in which I hate this place and a sense in which it's my favorite city in the world.

There are fewer coal miners in America than employees at Disney World. The people this is pandering to are mostly people who have fantasies about coal mining being more down to earth than hippie climate tech. A boring aversion to the future.