Software has got worse. Everything is a web page in a costume now — slower to open, does less, and it wants an account before it will tell you the time.

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It is that everybody involved was following a process. The manufacturers tested to a standard. The certifiers certified against the standard. The contractors specified a product that held a certificate. The building control officers checked the certificate existed. At every single link somebody did the thing their role required, and the result was a building that burned in a way everyone had been told was impossible. That is much more frightening than corruption. Corruption you can find and remove. A system where every participant discharges their duty correctly and the aggregate is catastrophic has no villain to sack, and no obvious repair. I think about it whenever anyone proposes fixing something by adding a compliance step. Sometimes another check is exactly what is needed. Sometimes it is one more person who can honestly say they did their part.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve. Every institution I have any faith in — the NHS, courts, universities, the BBC at its better moments — is one I would describe as slow, expensive and frequently maddening to deal with. And every organisation I have found genuinely pleasant to interact with is one I do not trust at all. Banks with lovely apps. Airlines with brilliant booking flows. Delivery companies that know exactly where my parcel is. I do not think this is a coincidence and I am not sure it is a paradox either. Institutions that owe you something have to be procedural, because the procedure is the accountability, and procedure is slow and irritating by nature. Companies that owe you nothing can afford to be delightful, because delight is cheap when there is no obligation underneath it. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question: when someone says a public service should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because the pleasant part and the unaccountable part might be the same part.

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.

Nobody actually likes standing desks. We all just got told sitting was killing us and now we're too embarrassed to sit back down.

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

For most software engineers a degree stopped being worth what it costs. It is now mainly a filter that employers use because filtering is expensive.

Right, the thing nobody says about "learn to code" advice: It was decent advice in about 2012 and terrible advice by about 2020, and the people giving it never updated. It got handed to redundant workers as though the shortage was permanent and the barrier was purely knowledge. Both of those turned out to be wrong within a decade. What actually happened is that the entry level filled up while the senior end stayed short, which is the worst possible shape for someone retraining at forty. You can learn the language in a year. You cannot manufacture eight years of having seen things go wrong, and that is what the remaining jobs are actually asking for. I do not think the advice was cynical. I think it was given by people who got in early and genuinely could not see which parts of their own path were the ladder and which were the timing.

We keep calling it a housing crisis like it's weather.

"Trauma" now stretches from genocide to a bad line manager, and somewhere in that stretch the word stopped doing any work at all.

Olympic sports get worse as they get more professional. What people actually miss is the amateurism, and it turns out that was most of the charm.

Open source got quietly captured by the companies it was supposed to be an escape from. Most of the big projects are staffed by people on three payrolls now, and the licence is the only part that still looks independent.

Ambition gets treated as a virtue and I am not convinced. Half the ambitious people I know are mainly frightened of turning out ordinary.

Genuine question: has anyone actually changed their mind because of something they read online? Not softened, not "considered" — changed.

Home advantage is mostly the crowd, and the empty-stadium seasons proved it — it shrank, it did not vanish, and what was left was travel and the referee.

Every messaging app eventually turns into a bad email client. Threads, then search, then folders, then somebody adds a rules engine and we are right back where we started.

Nuclear is the safest energy we have per unit generated, and thirty years of being squeamish about it is a large part of why we are still burning gas.

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.

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

Most of what psychology published before about 2015 does not replicate, and the field has been much more graceful about admitting it than any other would have been.