Nostalgia for early internet culture ignores that it was small, homogeneous and mostly male, and that almost everything people miss about it was a property of being small. Two hundred people can hold a norm in their heads without writing it down. Nothing about that survives contact with two million.

Am I the only one who finds "quiet luxury" is just expensive clothes for people who got embarrassed about logos?

Can we talk about the specific misery of a group chat trying to decide where to eat? Six people, all of whom have a preference, none of whom will state it first. Somebody offers a place. Two react with a thumbs up, which means nothing. One says "I'm easy!" which is a lie. The person who actually wanted Thai says nothing, because saying it now would look like overruling. Ninety minutes pass. You end up at the place nobody chose, which everyone privately rates about a six. The thing is that this is not a coordination problem, it is a status problem. Everyone knows the fastest solution is one person deciding. What nobody wants is to be the person who decided, because then the evening is theirs, and if the food is mediocre it is their fault. The only fix I have found is somebody booking it before the chat starts. Not suggesting — booking. Nobody has ever objected, which rather gives the game away: it was never that people disagreed, it was that nobody wanted to own it.

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.

A thing I cannot resolve about giving money to people begging. The argument against is well rehearsed and mostly correct: it may fund an addiction, it does not address the cause, the money would do more good given to an organisation set up to help, and the impulse is partly about how it makes me feel rather than what it does. The argument for is much shorter and I keep finding it harder to dismiss. Someone in front of me has asked for something I can trivially provide, and every framework I use to say no is a framework I constructed after the fact, sitting comfortably somewhere else. What I actually do is inconsistent — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the variable is mostly my mood and how much of a hurry I am in, which is the worst possible basis. I would rather hold either position honestly than keep operating a policy that is really just weather.

We will still be typing passwords in ten years. We have been promised their death for two decades and I am still resetting one most weeks.

There is no book everyone ought to have read, and the list is always suspiciously full of whatever the person making it was assigned at nineteen.

We treat mental health at work like it is about resilience training when it is mostly about workload and whether your manager is a decent person.

Every job I have had contained about four hours of real work a day and an enormous amount of theatre around it.

I've come round to thinking most productivity advice is just a way of feeling organised for about a week.

Cities keep building cycle lanes that stop. Just end, mid-road, and you are in traffic. What is the point of ninety percent of a cycle lane?

Every complaint about immigration in my town is actually a complaint about not being able to get a GP appointment, and both parties have found it easier to argue about the first one.

Most productivity advice is survivorship bias with a system bolted on. Setting the system up feels like work, which is the whole appeal.

Cities that solved housing did it by building an unremarkable amount of unremarkable housing for a very long time, which is why nobody can point to a dramatic example. The absence of a dramatic case is the finding, and it is also the politics: a policy whose costs are immediate and local and whose payoff is twenty years out is the hardest thing an elected person can attempt.

Remote work has made engineering teams worse, and the bit that broke is the part nobody wrote down: juniors learning by overhearing.

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

Ask a city what it wants and it says better public transport. Ask about the bus and the room goes quiet. The bus is the only bit that is affordable, deliverable this decade and actually useful to people without money — and it is the one thing no city gets excited about announcing.

An unpopular position I hold about hospitals: the food is bad for a reason that has nothing to do with catering, and fixing it would cost more than anyone will admit. Hospital food has to be safe for people with immune systems that barely work, edible by someone who cannot chew properly, compatible with about fourteen medical diets, transportable across a large building, and hold at temperature for the twenty minutes it takes to get to the far ward. Given those constraints, what arrives is roughly what has to arrive. Every campaign to improve it treats it as a failure of will, as though somebody in charge simply does not care whether patients enjoy lunch. Then a celebrity chef gets involved, produces something excellent in one ward for six weeks, and the programme quietly ends when it meets the other three hundred wards and the actual budget. I am not saying it could not be better. I am saying that "why is hospital food bad" has a real answer, and nobody campaigning about it ever engages with the answer.

Most political arguments look like disagreements about facts and are really disagreements about what matters. The first kind can be settled. Nobody in history has settled the second by producing a better statistic.

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

Getting a GP appointment has become a competitive sport and the people who are worst at sport are the ones who need it most.

Remote work did not fail. Managers who could only manage by looking at people failed, and remote work is what made that visible. Four years on, the teams that kept it are the ones that already wrote things down, and the teams that abandoned it are mostly the ones that never did.