I have stopped believing any product review I read and I do not have a replacement, which is a genuinely new situation.

UPI is the best thing an Indian government has built in my lifetime and it isn't close. A billion people moving money for free while most of the world still pays a card company three percent to do the same job.

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.

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

Moving house is the only reliable way to find out what you actually own, and the answer is always "far less than this".

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.

Within fifty years ageing will be treated as a condition rather than a fact, and the argument will move to who can afford the treatment.

The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

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

Podcasts are radio with the editing taken out and we have agreed to call that intimacy.

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

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.

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.

Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

Everybody is tired and nobody can say precisely of what, and I think that is the actual condition rather than a symptom of one.

The best decisions get made quickly. The ones that drag on for months usually dragged because nobody wanted to say the obvious thing out loud.

A thing about going to the doctor that took me far too long to work out. For years I went in and described my symptoms in the order they had bothered me, which is the order they occurred to me, which is almost exactly the wrong order. The thing I was most worried about came last, usually in the doorway, usually prefixed with "oh, and probably nothing, but". What changed it was a GP who interrupted me about forty seconds in and asked what I was actually frightened of. I said it out loud, she dealt with it in two minutes, and the remaining eight were useful for the first time in my adult life. I now write down one sentence before I go in, which is the thing I am afraid of, and I say it first. I am aware this sounds like a productivity tip for being ill. It has changed every appointment I have had since.

Every winter the entire country gets the same cough and we have all agreed to describe it as "something going round".

Ask anyone whether they want the truth from their doctor and they say yes, then go to pieces the moment a doctor is actually blunt with them.

Every health app I have tried eventually becomes a thing I am failing at rather than a thing that helps.

The honest reason I have not switched energy supplier, bank or insurer is that it is dull, and the entire industry is built on exactly that.

A university degree is now mostly a signal about who your parents were, and only incidentally about what you know. The tell is that employers screen on institution rather than transcript, and institution is set by admissions, which is set by schooling, which is set by money.

Everyone I know is one broken boiler away from a genuinely bad month and we have all agreed not to bring it up.

A backdoor for one government is a backdoor for everyone, and this is arithmetic rather than politics. A key that exists can be stolen.

Museums should explain less. I have started reading the wall text before looking at the thing, which means I am now being told what to see before I have seen it.