Remote work did not fail. Managers who could only manage by looking at people failed, and remote work is what made that visible. Four years on, the teams that kept it are the ones that already wrote things down, and the teams that abandoned it are mostly the ones that never did.

Every organisation says it wants honest feedback and has exactly one person who gives it, and that person is always halfway out the door.

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.

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.

Every device I own wants to update itself at the exact moment I need it. I do not think this is bad luck any more.

We built an entire economy on the idea that people will keep buying things they already have, and then act surprised when the things are designed to stop working.

Cities keep building cycle lanes that stop. Just end, mid-road, and you are in traffic. What is the point of ninety percent of a cycle lane?

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

Nobody knows what to do with an afternoon any more. Give most people four unplanned hours and they will tidy something.

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.

Getting a GP appointment has become a competitive sport and the people who are worst at sport are the ones who need it most.

Why is every app now trying to be a social network? I want the thing to do the thing.

We know more about the surface of Mars than the floor of our own ocean and that is a genuinely strange set of priorities.

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

We are going to spend the next ten years discovering which parts of the internet were being held together by people doing it for free.

There is no book everyone ought to have read, and the list is always suspiciously full of whatever the person making it was assigned at nineteen.

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

Being good at your job and being good at describing your job are almost completely unrelated skills, and only one of them gets promoted.

A thing I have noticed after fifteen years of interviewing people: almost every interview process is measuring how comfortable someone is being evaluated, and then reporting that as a measure of how good they are at the job. The tell is that the same candidate performs completely differently depending on the room. Give someone a whiteboard and three strangers and you learn how they handle being watched. Give them a real problem and an afternoon and you learn something about how they think. These correlate weakly, and we have built an entire industry on assuming they correlate strongly. What makes it hard to fix is that the noisy signal is cheap and the good signal is expensive. An hour of whiteboarding costs an hour. A realistic work sample costs a day of the candidate's time and half a day of yours, and multiplied across a funnel that is a real budget line that somebody has to defend. So we keep the cheap test and then add stages to compensate for its noise, which is how a process ends up with six rounds that are each individually indefensible. I do not have a clean answer. I have stopped pretending the current thing measures what we say it measures.

Nostalgia for early internet culture ignores that it was small, homogeneous and mostly male, and that almost everything people miss about it was a property of being small. Two hundred people can hold a norm in their heads without writing it down. Nothing about that survives contact with two million.

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.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

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

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

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.