Genuine question: can anyone name a single thing their MP has done? Not voted for. Done.

Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.

The best thing about a newspaper was that it ended. You got to the back page and you were done and nobody suggested anything else.

Lending money to family, and why I have stopped. I have done it four times. Twice it came back, twice it did not, and the two that did not are the ones that changed things — not because of the money, which I could afford, but because every subsequent conversation had it sitting in the room. The advice everyone gives is "only lend what you can afford to give away", and I think that is right about the money and wrong about the relationship. What you cannot afford is the asymmetry. They know. You know they know. There is no amount small enough to be invisible once it has not come back. What I do now is give a smaller amount and say it is a gift, out loud, once. It has cost me less and I have not lost anyone over it. It also feels slightly dishonest, because I am managing the relationship rather than helping, and I have not worked out whether that matters.

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.

Every messaging app eventually turns into a bad email client. Threads, then search, then folders, then somebody adds a rules engine and we are right back where we started.

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

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.

Saying the uncomfortable thing is usually the kind option, and almost nobody does it, because the discomfort arrives immediately and the kindness turns up months later.

Cricket is the only sport where you can go for lunch, come back, and nothing has happened, and that is a feature.

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

Everybody says they want politicians to admit mistakes and everybody punishes the ones who do, and I include myself in that.

Software has got worse. Everything is a web page in a costume now — slower to open, does less, and it wants an account before it will tell you the time.

Something I have thought about a lot since I started managing people, which nobody warned me about: you cannot tell someone they are underperforming in a way that does not change the relationship permanently. I do not mean they resent you, though sometimes they do. I mean that afterwards, every ordinary interaction has a second layer. You ask how the weekend was and they are checking whether you are asking because you are being normal, or because you are softening something. That layer does not go away when the performance improves. It just gets quieter. I still think you have to do it. Letting someone carry on failing is worse, and the version where you say nothing and then act surprised at review time is the genuinely unkind option. But I have stopped pretending it is a neutral conversation that a good manager can have without cost. It costs something every time, and the honest thing is to spend it deliberately rather than believe the technique makes it free.

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

Every government now governs mainly by announcing things, and the announcement has become the policy rather than a description of one.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

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.

Are smart wearables a fad?

Statistics should be taught instead of trigonometry. I have needed one of them roughly weekly since school and the other precisely never.

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.