How to be (temporarily) smarter
You’re unlikely to see me joining the 4am club; I’d rather be in the nice cosy bed club and still fast asleep. Still, I have achieved things, not despite my lack of industriousness but perhaps because of it.
Category: Opinion
Odyssey Online: Book I
I joked about starting an Odyssey book club in my Discord server because I was so fed up of people complaining about the Odyssey without having read it. To my surprise, people liked the joke enough that it turned into a real book club! We’re all bringing along the translations by E. V. Rieu, Robert […]
Short thoughts on facilitating virtual conversation salons
(inspired by Dipika Kohli and her conversation salons!) I like spaces where interesting conversations happen. Unfortunately, sometimes interesting conversations are not to be had within a sensible distance of the house. Or they are, but the people I want to converse with don’t live within sensible distance of my house, they live a plane ride […]
Documentation considered harmful (again)
Some months ago I read Samuel Albanie’s post Documentation Considered (Increasingly) Harmful. In it, Albanie argues that documentation quickly goes “stale” and doesn’t reflect the real state of a codebase, especially when it’s being frequently updated. Stale documentation is a real problem, but in my experience agents are simply not good enough yet at poking […]
A taxonomy of bad science
I have been reading the excellent Ben Recht on scientific waste. He writes: No one likes to admit it, but we need bad science to do good science. This is beautiful rhetoric, but not all kinds of bad science are created equal. Does Recht mean… I think there is a line where bad science starts […]
Exploring failure modes of vibe coding
Why can’t I get Codex to delete my repo?
What Are You Waiting For?
Making microzines.
The ancestor test
Once again I have been reading Robin Hanson on cultural adaptation and cultural drift. I am sympathetic to futarchy, and he invented it. I am less sympathetic to many of his proposed solutions to fix cultural drift. In a blog post from earlier this month, Hanson puts forward the idea of the “ancestor test” – […]
The best productivity app is the one you actually use
The best productivity app is the one you actually use Since I was a teenager, the number of productivity apps has just ballooned. You don’t need pen and paper anymore – you have zenware and Notion and Obsidian and etc etc etc. The world is drowning in productivity apps. Call me old-fashioned, but I am […]
4000 weeks
The average human lifespan is about 4000 weeks. When you put it that way, it’s a terrifyingly short amount of time.
