Nobody has ever explained to me why we accept that a phone lasts three years.

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

Nostalgia is mostly just not paying attention now. The past feels richer because it has been edited down to the good bits and you were not doing the admin.

Being the person in the group who organises things is a thankless job and it is always the same person, and that person is usually tired.

Nothing is allowed to be medium-sized any more. Everything is either a phenomenon or it failed.

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

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

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

Cookie banners were meant to give people control and have instead taught an entire continent to click the nearest button without reading anything. We have trained a reflex, not a decision.

The useful question in a job interview is not what they ask you, it is whether anybody there seems to be enjoying themselves.

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

Every popular fact you know about the brain is either wrong or from 1985. The ten percent thing, left brain right brain, learning styles, all of it, still being taught by people who mean well.

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.

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.

Local elections are the only ones where your vote plainly matters and they have the lowest turnout, which I cannot square with anything.

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.

Nobody has ever said "we should document this properly" and then documented it properly.

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.

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.

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.

Most advice on how to argue better assumes both people want to find out what is true, and in most real arguments at least one person is defending a position they have already told other people they hold.

The most useful thing I was ever taught about science is that a result with no error bars is a story.

Every government IT project fails the same way and everybody involved can describe the failure in advance, which is the part I cannot get past.

Nobody budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

Half of what gets called "doing your own research" is reading until you find somebody who already agrees with you and then stopping.