2025-08-15 23:16:57
Historically, a lot of my externalized knowledge is stored in chat apps. That is: if a friend sends me a link in whatsapp I don't need to store it anywhere else, because if I ever want to find it again I will associate it with that person and know to search for it in our chat history.
By contrast, if I find a link myself I have to bookmark it, and might never find it again if I forget in which of several possible places I did that. Over time I've worked to be more organized and store things I read/learn/think more cohesively regardless. But I do think there's something social to knowledge, and I wish knowledge-retention apps (of various kinds) made more effort to embed bits of knowledge in the social part of my brain.
We need more words for how well you can/can't hear people on the phone. When people say "can you hear me?" I want a succinct way to differentiate
1) I can hear you but you are quiet
2) I can hear you but there is more background noise than I would prefer, it is annoying
3) I can hear you 100% perfectly for 95% of the time, but intermittently it cuts out
Honestly the phone screen should ask me to vote, while we're speaking, on how good the call quality is, and show that to the other person, so that if the quality is not-great but not so bad that I'm going to complain about it, the person still finds out that e.g. talking on speakerphone consistently creates a much worse experience for their counterpart.
2025-08-13 21:27:00
I sometimes despair about 80/20ing online privacy and security: I fear this is one of those things where you either go to superhuman lengths to get privacy or you accept that you're getting nothing at all. (Richard Stallman abjures cell phones, key cards, credit cards, and browsing the web on his personal computer, while I am unwilling to give up any of these things).
But there's three things I do that I find convenient and mildly helpful. Please note: many times when I recommend software online it immediately gets worse, so apologies if that now happens with these.
Password manager that the nerds tell me is good and effective. I also use it for 2FA codes, which is kind of a violation of 2FA rules, but works for me. It also integrates directly with Fastmail to create arbitrary masked email addresses, allowing me not to give away my actual email to every random internet company.
cost: $36 per year per person, $60 per year for families
Email service that lets me create endless masked email addresses, one for each online signup. I also like having all of that go to a separate inbox from my main personal or work email addresses.
cost: $60 per year per person, $120 for families
Virtual credit cards. Lets you create a new, separate virtual card for every website or purchase.
This is the company I trust least on this list, in that I don't understand how they're making money or what they might do with my data in future, but given my options it feels better to me than giving my Main Card details out to every website.
You can restrict your virtual cards to a single vendor, and/or set spend limits on the cards or shut down individual cards completely, which seems great as a security feature. As a side bonus it helps you easily track where you're spending your money.
cost: free tier is weirdly good enough. Again, don't understand how they're making money.
Bonus note: looking at this list, if you're short on cash, Fastmail seems the most disposable – if you could find another way to generate masked emails you could skip it.
2025-08-11 21:23:31
Here's something that bothers me: various states and countries hold referenda for political decisions.
If the change-attempters win on the first try, a massive and permanent decision can get made based on a single specific moment in time. (Think Britain voting on whether to leave the European Union, for example).
If change-attempters lose, they can try to hold a second referendum later: if "yes" wins the second time the previous "no" vote counts for nothing, while if "yes" had won the first time there wouldn't have been a second chance to say "no". (Think Ireland's referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, or various other parts of the European Constitutional Treaty process)
Both of these outcomes seem weird to me, and it feels like they would be solved by making referenda "best of N" votes. For a sufficiently large issue, perhaps there should be multiple votes over multiple years, and the winner is the one that gets chosen at least 2 out of 3 times, or at least 3 out of 5, or whathaveyou.
I realise this would have downsides – it could be expensive and complex, there would be debates about whether two referenda were on exactly the same topic or a different one that requires a new set of votes, etc.
But for a sufficiently important topic – or in a place like California, with regular referenda ballots anyway – I think it might be worth trying, and I've never heard of it tried (I asked our somewhat-trusty LLM friends and they said it hadn't – if you know of somewhere that does it, please shout).
2025-08-08 22:12:10
The first advance copies of my game Person Do Thing have finally arrived stateside; order a copy now at want.persondothing.com. As a reader of this sentence you can get a discount on selected decks with code ANYTHING12
There's a trait I hate in TV shows, but which is hard to filter against when browsing because I don't have a name for it: basically, I hate when it's very obvious a bad thing is going to happen to the characters, and they are walking into the trap that you as the viewer can tell is coming, but they don't know it and you're just watching them and know it will come.
I don't mind when bad things happen to characters, even very bad things, as long as it wasn't obvious and stretched out for a while.
(Another thing I hate in TV is cringe. I suspect these preferences may be correlated, but I can't exactly put my finger on why).
I think a lot of readers would be shocked how few people read their favorite websites/newsletters.
This is partly just a factor of how many people love to write, and will absolutely do it for free. (It's getting edited your have to pay people for).
One upshot of this is that if you read something you like and are willing to spend 1 min looking up the writer's email address to send them a note, you will probably make them very happy.
I'd guess as a rule of thumb, if a writer's website has their email address listed (instead of making you go through an agent or whatever), they are un-famous enough that they probably still enjoy receiving emails.
2025-08-06 21:03:32
Imagine a decision that you can mess up at both ends of a spectrum – working too hard or not hard enough, eating too much or too little, being too risk-taking or too risk-shy. (Your humble blogger suggests that most human decisions in fact have this property: I was going to make a joke about "maybe except drinking poison", but then I remembered hormesis).
Now, imagine that more people in your circles make one mistake than the other, and live to regret it. If you go around listening to people's stories, they will all tend to point in one direction:
In one sense, you can glean useful information from these utterances: if everyone around you says they wish they'd socialized more in college, maybe you're the kind of person who ought to consider socializing more.
In another sense, these statements are not telling you which choice is better; they're just telling you which mistake is more common. It may actually be that the more-common path is less likely to lead to regret, but just from the base rates you'll hear of far more people regretting it.
I have a particular pet peeve, in this regard, for the oft-quoted line (from Lewis Carrol / Mark Twain / Other fake quote-attributees) about how we only regret the chances we didn't take, the relationships we were afraid to have, etc.
This is simply false: I have successfully filled every corner of the Do/Don't/Regret/Celebrate matrix. I have spoken up for myself and regretted it, I have not-kissed people and been glad about it, I have taken chances and felt permanently uncertain whether my life is better or worse as a result.
What is the outcome of this? I really don't know, which is probably why it isn't popular advice. I think the only thing I've never heard anyone regretting is telling all their friends to subscribe to the Atoms vs Bits newsletter.
2025-08-04 22:51:11
This one makes me sad to write, but:
I've had two people who worked for me who told me early on that their previous manager was terrible, horrible, a nightmare, etc.
This instantly activated a visceral protectiveness in me, and made go out of my way to give them a better experience this time, sometimes at great personal cost.
Eventually, they each decided that I (as a manager) was terrible, horrible, a nightmare, etc.
It's possible they are just serially unlucky and that both me and their previous manager were truly nightmares, but for obvious reasons I was less convinced the second time around.
I've heard similar stories in social and romantic contexts: someone's new friend or partner tells of ex-friends or ex-lovers who were [various bad things], and this initially rouses great sympathy, but within a short time the sympathetic someone is being described in exactly the same terrible terms.
When I first had this realization I felt pretty horrible about the prospect that I would be shut off to people who tell me terrible stories about their ex-whatevers: surely that would also mean wrongly cutting out people who have truly suffered a lot, and truly deserve a bit of karmic redress?
This is definitely a risk; you can imagine that some people really are just super unlucky in work/love/friendship, and really do just attract a series of bad workmates/lovers/friends, and really don't deserve it. I deeply don't want to end up pushing away those people, and in fact I'd love to in-some-small-way help them have a better time in life, which I guess is how you fall down the hole in the first place.
But recently I've noticed something that makes me slightly less worried about becoming suspicious of people with endlessly negative stories: I've noticed that many of the people I know who've had the worst, most-unfair life experiences talk about them in shockingly even-keeled and un-blamy ways.
In fact, my experience talking to them often involves me saying "wait, what the hell, this person was terrible to you, I'm angry on your behalf," and then them saying "oh, I mean, I guess so," but still maintaining a balanced view on both themselves and the person who wronged them.