Atoms vs BitsModify

2026-11-12 23:11:00

For a long time I could not tie my shoelaces, or at least, not in a way that stayed tied. This was a source of great embarrassment and frustration, since "unable to tie their own shoelaces" is generally a symbol for stupid and/or incompetent, and also it's just really annoying when you're walking along and your laces are loose.

A couple of years ago there were a spate of YouTube videos called (variants of) You're Tying Your Laces Wrong, basically explaining that if you do both loops of your shoelace-knot in the same direction then any future friction will push the knot open, and you can fix this by simply doing one cross left-over-right and the next cross right-over-left.

Despite the fact that you would think this instruction is straightforward, and that just by chance if you went in random directions you would surely get it right about half the time, I was continuously unable to implement this and my laces continued indecorously untangling themselves.

HOWEVER. Recently I discovered a NEW spate of YouTube videos declaring a NEW way you're tying your shoelaces wrong, this time recommending a knot called Berluti. And reader, this one actually works for me:

I think in some way that I don't have words for, this knot is more robust and fail-safe than the other one: you can very immediately tell if you've done it wrong, and (once I got my head around the instructions) I found that by default it seemed to go right.

It was also just sufficiently different from the Classic Knot that I think it was in some way easier to internalize than a literal-and-metaphorical twist on something I'd been doing a certain way for years.

So. If you or someone you love are unable to tie your laces, check out this video (or its endless similar cousins). A better world is possible, in this as in so many things.

2026-11-10 23:11:00

Many years ago I bought a Marshall bluetooth speaker, it was so great. More recently I have bought Anker bluetooth speakers, they are also great. I remember seeing reviews for JBL bluetooth speakers, the people who have them say they're really great.

I am sure there are bad bluetooth speakers out there, but fundamentally I think that 1) bluetooth speakers as a product-category are great, 2) they've gotten much better in the last few decades, 3) people tend to purchase them very rarely, and if you're happy with the first one you get you're likely to stick with that brand in future.

As a result, I think some people make a kind of philosophical error, thinking that their very specific bluetooth speaker brand is great rather than that bluetooth speakers are great and almost-any reputable brand of speaker would have impressed them.

I could say the same about my XGIMI portable projector: it is WILD to me that you can get high-quality wall projection for a few hundred bucks, you can point it from any angle and it self-aligns to a perfect rectangle, incredible stuff. But (with all due respect to XGIMI), I suspect that what I'm impressed by is the state of modern projector technology, and that there are many other brands that are equally good at it, I just don't have a reason to go and find out.

Probably tech products are over-represented in this dynamic, since we buy them fairly rarely and the quality-to-price ratio keeps improving from both contributors. (I love my cordless vacuum cleaner, but I have no real sense of how it compares with other modern vacuum cleaners, only that it's so much better than the vacuum cleaners of my youth). But I'm sure there's other types of products that follow this dynamic as well.

I think mostly it's fine that people misattribute the greatness of the category to their specific item: there is no reason for me to love my XGIMI projector any less, just because in some other nearby universe I am loving some other acronym. But in certain circumstances it's important and relevant whether the things you love about an item are specific to one brand or just features of the general category, so I think the distinction is worth acknowledging.

There's actually a social version of this that you see sometimes. E.g. you meet someone who's in a good relationship for the first time in their life, and are talking about how great their new partner is, but citing it to very basic stuff that really everyone should do for each other. And in your head you're like: I'm delighted for you bud!, I'm glad you have these nice things. But also, those are just the basic qualities of a good relationship, they're pretty much standard with any decent brand.

2026-11-09 23:11:00

There's a famous Tumblr post that goes:

My deepest darkest fantasy is that I collapse on the street and I am rushed to the hospital. They perform a bunch of tests and find out I am severely deficient in some kind of vitamin. Then I start taking the vitamin and I become the happiest cleverest person alive because all my problems were caused by this one deficiency

I often had a sense that there were a few Candidate Vitamins that many people should know about – iron and vitamin B12 come up a lot for vegetarians, especially vegetarians feeling lethargic – but those are easily testable if you think you might be lacking.

Recently, though, I've seen a couple of posts from people claiming they have found their Vitamin and it's, like, a specific amino acid (glycine, betaine, etc) that I don't think gets covered in any normal blood test.

So I figured I'd crowd-source: f you've found your Vitamin – a single, simple intervention that weirdly solved many of your problems – I'd love to hear about it. (Bonus points if you're vegetarian, I do suspect there are limits to vegetarian diets that some of us might not notice in real time).

[contrary take: see Spencer arguing most people don't need supplements]

2026-11-07 00:11:00

A bit of a weird blogpost: could any of you help me (vibe)code a widget based on Timur Kuran's preference falsification cascades?

I basically want to make an interactive version of this image from his book, to help solidify the intuition that small differences in collective preferences can have huge impact on outcomes.

It is extremely possible that this widget can be one-shotted with the latest LLMs, but I simply can't muster the attention to do it. If you would like to collab on this, please reply, I'd love to work with you!

2026-11-06 00:11:00

I love boardgame product development: it's one of the knottiest human psychology problems I've ever worked on, where the problem is "how do I put a set of objects and words into a box such that when people open it it will reliably generate specific emotions or experiences?"[^1]

Which leads to some weird challenges, like:

• early in the process, many boardgame prototypes are actively not enjoyable to play, and it's very hard to guess which of them have that necesarry grain of enjoyment in them if you just changed the setup slightly, and which of them are fundamentally not-good and never will be. You kind of have to sit there thinking e.g. "I'm not having fun, but is there any part of this that could theoretically become fun?" Which is like dissecting jokes, it is itself not-fun.
• as the designer, while testing, you are simultaneously experiencing two very different things: 1) the actual experience of the game in its current state, and 2) your own tired and complicated relationship to the thing you made. The upshot is that at some points you will inevitably not be enjoying yourself regardless of how good the game is. So you have to figure out whether you're not enjoying the game because of your current difficult Creator Relationship with it, or because it's not currently working, which feels like.... speculating at the hypothetical existence of fun the way that astronomers find stars by the way they affect other distant bodies.
• A large part of the design problem (especially for light/party games) is "when people encounter these objects for the first time, what will they assume you're supposed to do with them? How can I maximize the chances that whatever-they-do-with-them will be enjoyable?" It's unbelievably hard to write fully-clear rules in a rulebook.... and my sense is that most party game players don't actually read rulebooks anyway. Which means that the most useful testing experience is an infinite stream of people who have never encountered the game before, because once people know anything they know too much. I do think the ideal boardgame designer would be someone who's willing to approach endless strangers in the street and ask them to Try Something For Me, but if you're not that person you're in a bit of a pickle.

I suspect that other types of product development have analogous problems, but this one is mine. I don't think everyone should design a boardgame because I don't think everyone should do anything, but I do think boardgame design provides a pretty insightful experience of the problem of human communication: how do I cause other people, who I'll never directly speak to and who have infinite different lives, to do particular things, predictably?

[^1]: one of those emotions is Fun/Enjoyment, but there are many others that also work great

2026-11-04 00:11:00

If you've ever had a friend write a traditionally-published book, you will inevitably have gotten an email asking you to PLEASE preorder the book because 1) bookstores choose what to stock based on order numbers, 2) pre-orders count as first-week sales, so they're the book's best shot to get onto a bestseller list.

I try my best to contribute whenever this happens, because I want my friends to succeed, but I have to admit I feel pretty salty about it. One reason is that I don't actually want a hardback, and it costs $32, and 90% of that goes to the publisher/retailers/etc, so on the material side of the transaction I'm spending $32 to send my pal $3 for an object I don't actually want. I wish I could just give my friend $20 and then buy the e-book version for $12, but so it goes.

But even more than that, I feel salty because Publishers pester authors about how important pre-orders are, they make authors email all their friends and relations to do this "please pre-order my book" thing, and in return they are willing to give ABSOLUTELY LITERALLY NOTHING.

At the absolute bare minimum, pre-ordering a book should get me a 10% discount on list price. I know at this level it doesn't really matter economically but... you are asking me to tie up my money 6 months in advance, it is historically just a norm across most industries that if you ask someone to pre-pay you have to offer a cheaper price for it. But obviously it's not about the money, it's about the vibe: you are asking me to do a thing that helps you out and gives me 0 benefit, can you please just make a minimal good-will gesture so I can feel good about the interaction? This is 0% the author's faults, so I do it anyway, but it makes it way harder to be excited about helping.

And that gets at the real core of the problem: rather than making me feel Part Of Something, Publishers make me feel taken-advantage-of for trying to participate in supporting a book. It seems to me that Publishers could massively benefit themselves by treating pre-order customers with a bit more graciousness. Kickstarter is a very successful business model for many reasons, one of which is that if a person feels like a (small but real) part of the development of a project, they are way more invested in it and excited to help promote it.

There is no obvious reason why big publishers couldn't have a special pre-order platform where you pre-order books (at a small discount) and get made to feel like a Friend and Supporter, and then I'm pretty sure you'd be more likely to tell other people about the book and encourage them to buy it too. And this would not only help that specific book but allow publishers to build an email list of high-value Supporters, which would help them sell more books in the future.

One of the strangest parts of this is that it's not even clear to me that a discount Supporter Tier would need to cost Publishers any money! See, most Stuff Online is sold through Amazon [citation needed], but most sellers make higher margins when they sell directly. Amazon normally makes it approximately impossible to sell a good from your own online store for less than the Amazon price, and since Amazon has super-fast shipping and extremely easy checkout, it's hard to offer a workable incentive to customers for buying from your own store even when that greatly increases your profit margin. (I think Amazon's Most Favoured Nation Clause is one of the defining features of modern commerce, a huge chunk of dark matter warping everything else in online shopping – I will write more about this another day).

Anyway! To the best of my knowledge, pre-orders could just completely get around this problem because Amazon is matching a product's current price, not the ever-used price. So Publishers could do a one-month Supporter Pre-order window where people can buy from their own platform at a discount, ideally get some other warm fuzzy perk as well, and then once the window is over the book goes up for pre-order on Amazon etc at the normal price. They'd even get my email address in the process, which is valuable for future sales and which Amazon doesn't give them!

Publishers: please! I'm begging you, think about the psychology of this thing. Let me feel good about doing a thing I already want to do, and develop an actual relationship with me that you could profit from in the long run, rather than making me feel like a useless chump who's being cornered into giving an interest-free loan to a billion-dollar company in order to do my pal a favour.