Weddings have got completely out of hand and everybody involved seems to be having a worse time than they would at a decent party.

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

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

Football has too much football now.

The replication crisis never really ended, we just stopped finding it interesting.

Running a car costs most people about four hundred a month once you count everything, and almost nobody has ever counted everything.

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes who pays first. Which means another decade spent explaining the greenhouse effect is a decade spent answering a question that stopped being asked.

Hot take: the reason nobody trusts polls any more isn't that polls got worse. It's that we started reading them as predictions instead of measurements, and then blamed them for failing at a job they never claimed to do.

Every few years somebody announces that we have cured a thing in mice, and nobody ever writes the follow-up where it did not work in people.

Olympic sports get worse as they get more professional. What people actually miss is the amateurism, and it turns out that was most of the charm.

"Just be more confident" ignores that confidence is downstream of having been right in front of people a few times, and nobody can give you that. You can only be handed the room, and whoever is giving the advice is usually the one who decides who gets the room.

Being late is a decision that your time is worth more than mine. There is no version of it that isn't that, however pleasantly it gets phrased.

Science journalism is mostly press releases with the caveats removed, and the caveats were the science.

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.