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

Cities that solved housing did it by building an unremarkable amount of unremarkable housing for a very long time, which is why nobody can point to a dramatic example. The absence of a dramatic case is the finding, and it is also the politics: a policy whose costs are immediate and local and whose payoff is twenty years out is the hardest thing an elected person can attempt.

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

An unpopular position I hold about hospitals: the food is bad for a reason that has nothing to do with catering, and fixing it would cost more than anyone will admit. Hospital food has to be safe for people with immune systems that barely work, edible by someone who cannot chew properly, compatible with about fourteen medical diets, transportable across a large building, and hold at temperature for the twenty minutes it takes to get to the far ward. Given those constraints, what arrives is roughly what has to arrive. Every campaign to improve it treats it as a failure of will, as though somebody in charge simply does not care whether patients enjoy lunch. Then a celebrity chef gets involved, produces something excellent in one ward for six weeks, and the programme quietly ends when it meets the other three hundred wards and the actual budget. I am not saying it could not be better. I am saying that "why is hospital food bad" has a real answer, and nobody campaigning about it ever engages with the answer.

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

I would rather pay for a thing once than be in a relationship with it forever, and almost nothing is sold that way any more.

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

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

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

A thing I cannot resolve about giving money to people begging. The argument against is well rehearsed and mostly correct: it may fund an addiction, it does not address the cause, the money would do more good given to an organisation set up to help, and the impulse is partly about how it makes me feel rather than what it does. The argument for is much shorter and I keep finding it harder to dismiss. Someone in front of me has asked for something I can trivially provide, and every framework I use to say no is a framework I constructed after the fact, sitting comfortably somewhere else. What I actually do is inconsistent — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the variable is mostly my mood and how much of a hurry I am in, which is the worst possible basis. I would rather hold either position honestly than keep operating a policy that is really just weather.

Test cricket is the only sport where the boring bit is the point and I will not be taking questions.

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

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.

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

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

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

Nobody says out loud that getting fitter in your forties is mostly about being willing to be bad at something in public.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

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

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