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.

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

AI is going to destroy more jobs than it makes. Every previous wave moved people up a ladder; this one is coming for the rungs.

Sat down and added up the subscriptions. Seventy one pounds a month, and I could name four of them.

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.

Nobody knows their neighbours and everybody says they would like to, which suggests the barrier is not that we do not want to.

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.

Every sport eventually optimises the fun out of itself, because the people playing are trying to win and nobody is trying to make it enjoyable to watch.

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.

The four-day week only really works if your job is thinking. Every pilot anyone quotes was an office, and nobody ever ran one in a warehouse.

Search has got noticeably worse and I have started adding the name of a forum to the end of every query, which is a strange thing to have to do in 2026.

Open-plan offices are the clearest case I know of an entire industry adopting something because it was cheaper and inventing the reason afterwards.

Public transport should be judged on whether it is usable by someone with a pram, a suitcase and a bad knee — not on its top speed. Every network that passes that test turns out to be pleasant for everyone else too, and almost every network that fails it was designed around a commuter who is twenty-eight and carrying a laptop.

Startups are a worse deal for employees than they were ten years ago. Same hours, same risk, a much thinner slice, and the exit that justified it happens far less often.

Everyone I know is on their phone in bed and everyone I know is tired. I am not saying it is causal. I am saying it is a hell of a coincidence.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

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

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

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.

Follow the rules that make no sense anyway. The alternative is everybody deciding privately which ones are silly, and that unravels faster than you would think.

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes who pays first. Which means another decade spent explaining the greenhouse effect is a decade spent answering a question that stopped being asked.

Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.

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.

Nearly everything we were told about food between about 1980 and 2015 turned out to be wrong, and almost nobody who told us has ever accounted for it.