We talk about AI as though the hard part is intelligence. The hard part has always been that we cannot say what we want precisely enough.

My handwriting has become genuinely illegible and I only found out because I had to fill in a form in front of somebody.

Health advice aimed at women is still mostly either about being thinner or about having children, and it is genuinely strange how little else there is.

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.

Being a fan of something has turned into a job. Watch the thing, read the discourse about the thing, have a position on the discourse. I miss just liking a programme.

The hardest thing to find now is something made by one person who was not thinking about an audience.

T20 made Test cricket better, not worse, and the people who say otherwise have not watched a fourth innings run chase lately.

You can love the work of someone appalling. I have never once met a person who manages it consistently, but in principle you can.

Tipping has quietly become a thing you do for a screen rather than a person, and I notice I resent it far more.

Living in a city is greener than living in the countryside, which reliably annoys everyone who moved out for the fresh air.

Splitting the bill evenly is a tax on whoever ordered the salad, and everyone knows it, and everyone does it anyway because saying so costs more than the difference.

Being late is a decision that your time is worth more than mine. There is no version of it that isn't that, however pleasantly it gets phrased.

Job hopping is the only reliable pay rise and companies have nobody to blame but themselves. Three percent internally, twenty percent to leave, every year, forever.

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.

I miss being unreachable and I am aware I could simply turn the phone off, and I am also aware that I will not.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

Most people who say they want honest feedback want accurate praise, and the two are easy to confuse until the feedback is actually negative. You can watch the switch happen in real time: the request is sincere, and then the first genuine criticism arrives and the next twenty minutes are spent supplying context.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.

Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

Telling people to "just move somewhere cheaper" ignores that cheap places are cheap because the work isn't there, which is the entire thing you needed the money for.

Owning things is overrated, says the man with a garage he cannot park in.

Everybody says they want politicians to admit mistakes and everybody punishes the ones who do, and I include myself in that.

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

The best manager I ever had appeared to do almost nothing. It took me three years to work out that was the job.

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.