2026-07-10 19:11:40

Every so often, someone will tell me I simply MUST read such-and-such, or HAVE TO visit someplace, or WILL LOVE a certain movie.

I hate this so much.

I can't tell how much it's just a cultural thing; I can't tell how much they think they're speaking hyperbolically, rather than literally commanding me to do something; I don't know how much any other people are bothered by this, or if this is unique to me.

But I hate it! Please stop.

2026-07-09 19:11:46

Perhaps if you grew up in Canada they taught you about this in history class, but it's brand new to me!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Daughters

Apparently in the 1600s, France had a severe gender imbalance in their efforts to colonize North America. 

In English speaking colonies, whole communities and families moved together– men, women and children--usually to escape religious persecution and create utopian communities without government oversight (the North) or to reinvent feudal farming communities (the South). 

In contrast, the French government was way more hands-on with their colonies, and New France was more of an economic effort than a social/utopian experiment. Most of the French colonists were young working men without wives or families.

So, for ten years (1663-1673), King Louis XIV sent about 800 penniless young women to New France, all expenses paid, with a completely new wardrobe, household linens, and dowry thrown in. This initial financial boost meant that the girls weren't prostitutes or servants, but rather free agents with the economic power to choose their own husbands. Because the King was providing their dowry, they were known as "The King's Daughters" which is a pretty cheeky nickname--a bit of a flex, a bit of a roast. 

The best part of reading this Wikipedia entry is scrolling the Famous Descendants section. In addition to some male ice hockey players and at least one canonized Catholic saint, these women passed their genetics on to:

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Angelina Jolie

MADONNA (!!!) 

Chloe Sevegne

Now I'm re-imagining the conversation:

ADVISOR: Your Majesty, we don't have enough women in the New World. 

KING: Easy fix, Paris is chock full of baddies. Go there and get me 800 of the hottest, smartest, hungriest girls you can find.

KING: Oh, and make sure they can absolutely kick someone's ass!" 

Yes, I knowwwww that the Notable Descendants section has a massive selection bias, but it's delightful to imagine a boatfull of healthy, strong 18-25 year-old Madonnas, Angelinas, Chloës and Hilarys. It's such drama! 

What kind of social instability and absolute havoc was going on in those ten years when 800 of them showed up? What were they thinking? What were they feeling? How much did they interact with First Nations women? Did they have any moral or intuitive scruples about colonization? What was it like to live in a world with very few older women? I'm sure there is some historical record answering these questions, but since I don't speak or read French, I will probably just enjoy wondering and not knowing. 

Thanks for Wikiing with me! :-) 

2026-07-08 21:44:47

Ever wondered how your namesake stock has been performing these last few years? Are you outperforming or, um, experiencing headwinds? Well, now you can find out.

[Cannot stress enough that this is a toy, I make no guarantees on the accuracy of this data, and this is not investment advice.]

2026-07-07 19:11:00

I once met a guy who had previously gotten to the top of two different highly competitive professions. I asked him for the secret of his success, which is probably a bad question in general, and he replied:

Most people don't want to succeed, they just want to say that they tried their best and there was nothing they could do.

My first reaction was genuine outrage: I thought the guy was a privileged prick, that he had no idea how truly insurmountable many people's circumstances are, and how lucky he was to have got to where he'd been.

My second reaction was to think about my own life and go:

oh.

I guess I do often give up at the first obstacle.

And:

oh.

I do secretly enjoy the relief of thinking well, I tried– I guess there was nothing I could do.

I still believe there are people who really can't do anything about their circumstances. And that it's fraught to apply this philosophy to anyone but yourself.

There is also a sense in which The Things You Can Do are strongly constrained by the range of things you're willing to do, and that e.g. sometimes you can become a famous artist or philosopher if you're willing to abandon your children, but many of us think that this does not actually justify the results.

But with all those caveats, I do suspect that many people would benefit from trying on for size the thought:

"I'm not truly trying to succeed at X right now, I'm content to say I tried and there was nothing I could do."

And then: "What would I do if I really wanted and needed to succeed at X?"

And then: trying that, and a couple other additional things too.

2026-07-02 19:11:50

1. The easiest people to make friends with are the friends of your existing friends — both because your friends are unusually likely to share your taste in people, and because a pre-existing mutual is an extremely helpful shortcut to establishing trust.

2. As such, if you’re moving to a new place, you should just ask everyone you know whether they know anyone there you should meet. (Sometimes you won’t become friends with those people directly, but you will become friends with their friends, etc).

3. Also, when you’ve just moved to a new city, you have to say “yes” to everything. Even when you've just arrived and are not settled in yet, and even activities that aren’t exactly your jam — be a little overly-easy up front, and then later you can co-ordinate on doing the things you enjoy more.

4. The main dropped ball I personally see in terms of budding friendships is followup after the first meeting. You go to a party and you meet a friend-of-friend and you both vibe. Most people in my circles seem to make vague noises like “well I hope I see you around!”, or at best they ask for a number but never make a concrete bid to hang out. My guess is that the tipping point for Becoming Friends is probably seeing someone 3 times, so if you’re at 1 you gotta work hard to make the next 2 happen; after that it'll either happen naturally or no.
5. It's genuinely hard to differentiate sometimes between “person who does want to be friends but is somewhat disorganized and/or has a busy life” from “person who doesn’t want to be friends, really, but is awkward saying no.” I think you just have to swallow this risk somewhat: reach out 2 or 3 times (tops) over a few weeks or months, and if they can’t coordinate let it slide. Unfortunately there is no way to know for sure either way — I've had very good friends who I really thought were trying to politely reject me at first, but who were actually just extremely disorganized and/or flaky.
6. One helpful trick sometimes is to invite people to something last-minute that you’re pretty sure they can’t come to, so they hopefully won’t feel social pressure about saying “no” to it. Text them something like “hey I know it’s super last-minute but me and some friends are doing XYZ tonight, want to come?” If they actually can come: great. If they text back quickly and enthusiastically saying they can’t tonight but would love to [do whatever] in future, also great – they do want to be friends and genuinely can't make it. If they don’t reply till after the event, or if they just reply with a “sorry I have plans”, they probably aren’t looking to be friends, though again you can never really be certain.

7. This one is up to you but I really think if possible you should travel to the other person the first couple of times (unless they very enthusiastically decide to travel to you). Just make it as easy as possible for the other person to say “yes” — go to where they live, or to the activity they like, as a catalyst for the friendship, then later you can get things on an even footing. (The second part is important too, nobody likes a doormat, truly).

8. From what I remember of high school chemistry, a lot of reactions require a certain amount of "activation energy" for the two components to combine, but once they've melded you need much less energy to keep them together. A lot of my previous tips could be re-written as: don't get into a relationship that requires unreasonable amounts of your energy to maintain, but do be willing to provide most-or-all of the activation energy for a friendship to start. My sense is that many friendships don't get going because neither party (nor lucky outside circumstances) successfully provide the needed activation energy, even though both parties would have enjoyed the friendship once it started.
9. As with throwing parties: when making friends, really try to be at ease around the other person, even at the cost of other priorities. I know it might sound like I’m screaming RELAX! COME ON, RELAX ALREADY! at you, but I truly think “being at ease and putting others at ease” is an important and surprisingly actionable skill. E.g. if you’re anxious about someone else’s experience you might be tempted to keep asking “are you having a good time? Are you cold? Are you hot? Am I being annoying? I’m being annoying, I know it, tell me.” But this does not put people at ease, so instead you gotta just breathe in and out (or whatever your personal method is of deescalating your feelings) and prioritize being at ease over fixing the (possible) problem. Similarly if you’re thinking “oh wow I’m so boring I have nothing to say”, remember that being at ease is more important than being interesting, so don’t stress the interesting-ness if it puts you ill-at-ease. Etc etc etc for other doubts and worries.
10. The Propinquity Effect – "the tendency for people to form friendships or romantic relationships with those whom they encounter often" – is one of the last social psychology results I actually believe in. In the old days people became friends by running into each other in the neighbourhood a few times, but we don’t live in that world any more so you have to do the same thing digitally. Send people some texts occasionally, even if it’s a dumb meme or an unnecessary question or a thing that made you think of them. (I am not great at doing this, if I'm honest, but I think it’s a great thing to do). Again, don’t overdo it and if they never text you first/back then you gotta let it go, etc, but first you gotta try a bit. (Or, you know, join a club or activity where you'll see the same people multiple times, that works too).
11. I still think small groupchats are an underrated social technology, and that if e.g. you hang out with 3 people, it’s nice to make a little groupchat of those 3 people and send them a photo of the evening (or whatever) so that in future if you go to something you can send a text to that group and have those people feel like they’re part of a (mildly) cohesive unit. I get endlessly made fun of for making too many groupchats, and I know some people do truly find it annoying, but frankly the benefits outweigh the costs so I keep doing it anyway.

I made a game, it's a great way to make friends. If you like Charades, Taboo or Monikers you might enjoy it.

2026-06-30 19:11:10

We must now face the inevitable and talk about AI.

I think it's obvious to everyone that I don't use AI for writing these blogposts, since 1) the ideas are original and specific, 2) the style is idiosyncratic, unpolished, and usually brief.

I do use AI for the little online widgets I make, and I think some of you would be shocked at how much of the work on those was done by the AI directly, and how fun it is to say "can you make me a tool that does XYZ?" and have it spit out something workable from the start. I also use AI for images, e.g. here.

I know a lot of you have strong feelings against AI use, and I respect that. Personally I have complicated feelings about the impact these tools will have on creative work. Here's my thoughts:

I really do believe that some crafted objects contain something you might call The Divine Spark. There are certain ceramic cups that for reasons quite beyond me feel immediately right and true when you hold them. And I think that even amateur ceramicists sometimes make pieces that have this quality (despite being extremely unprofessional in other ways!), and that some professional ceramicists seem able to produce them consistently, and that I've never yet seen a machine make a piece that has this quality. And I actually do believe that this points at something meaningful about this universe.

On the other hand, a lot of the art we collectively consume every day has long been spark-less, and I don't yet believe that going from human-made-slop to AI-slop is meaningfully worse. The confusing part to me is why we surround ourselves with slop to begin with; I have never been able to explain, to myself or anyone else, why I spend 90% of my art-consuming-time on trash IN A WORLD WHERE THERE IS ALREADY MORE INCREDIBLE ART THAN I COULD EXPERIENCE IN A LIFETIME, if any of you know what's up with this I am begging you to explain me. But in any context where people were already consuming things that lack any connection to a soul, I don't personally see the difference between having it be AI or human soullessness.

For me, the operative question right now is whether AI overall helps make human art better or worse. And I think the answer is.... both? I think that any kind of supportive technology can either enfeeble or enrich, i.e. it can help you get better at doing something naturally by yourself, or can become something you rely on so much that you therefore never get better yourself.

I don't have a great theory for when and why something becomes enriching rather than enfeebling. This has all been said a million times before but the Printing Press has been (generally) good for writers, since it saves us from writing everything out by hand, and therefore let millions of people have meaningful creative experiences they couldn't have had otherwise.

The press had negative consequences as well, in that it reduced the amount that people memorize and story-tell, right? Socrates was right that writing decays the memory and circumvents certain kinds of dialogical relationships, no? Maybe not, I don't know – perhaps there are more standup comics today than there were bards in the ancient world, perhaps everything just becomes more with time. I don't really know that much about the past.

I'm also struck that during every moment of change, the relevant privilege group – that is, the people who had the fortune to already be good at the thing the technology helps with – will, by default, be aghast about the change; moreover, that even after hearing this argument (in general) they will believe that in this case their rights are earned.

So the medieval monarchies truly did believe in the Divine Right of Kings, and/but those monarchs were the extreme beneficiaries of it. And when I mentioned this in a college seminar everyone nodded happily, but then when I said that the same applied to us (the seminar participants) as the winners of the current system, everyone got mad at me. Because in our case it was different, we worked hard to be there and it was entirely meritocratic and blah blah blah blah blah.

And both things could be true at once, there could be good reasons to believe in the merits of the current system, and as the winners of that system you would be super highly incentivized to justify it regardless of its complicated pros and cons.

So I think there's something a bit treacherous about e.g. highly literate people who have spent their life benefiting from being good at spitting out words, assessing the merits of a new technology that is extremely good at spitting out words.

I have certain skills and resources – e.g. the ability to improvise a fairly passable poem – that have now become commoditized and lost 99% of their value overnight. I think this is "the problem of expertise" more broadly: the "experts" are the people most likely to understand the value of something, and also the people who have the most entrenched interest in it, and it's hard to separate the two. I really did work hard on my writing, and I really do think it's bad that the cost of slop-production has fallen to zero, and that thoughtful writers will get drowned out in the process.

And/but the total impact of AI is some combination of "the impact on people who were already good at what AI does" and "the impact on people who were previously not-good at what AI does," and there's a very real chance that the overall outcome is "it's bad for me specifically but good for humans overall," but it'll be hard for the me's of this world to admit that. (It might not be true!, but if it's true it'll be hard to admit it).

The other thing about AI is that it's such a good complement for so many things, and in theory a good complement enables better work from its complementers. I'll write about this more someday but imagine a farmer before the development of mechanization: their output is largely a function of their physical strength, so if you're a 10x strong farmer you can grow 10x more crops than your neighbour.

Then someone invents the tractor and now 1) there's very little advantage to being physically stronger, but 2) there's tons of advantage to being smart and strategic and planning your fields correctly, or whatever. Previously if you were very smart but happened to be weak you couldn't really reap the advantages of your farming-smarts, but now with tractors you finally can, and (what's more) you can now come up with even smarter farming strategies that didn't make sense previously.

And so much of art is like this: previously to be a singer-songwriter you had to be good at writing lyrics and good at writing music and good at singing and good at playing instruments, and now if you're good at any one of these you have an amazing collaborator who can do the others. And honestly I think that's beautiful, and important, and so long as people actually do keep aspiring to be good at at-least-one of these, it's possible that AI will lead to better human art ability. And I know what some of you will say – "you could have just collaborated with another human who had those skills! That is what we're here for" – but as someone who spent a decade trying and very occasionally managing to collaborate with other musicians, the collaboration costs are really really high, and it's obvious to me that 99% of the art that could have existed in the last few decades just never came into being, and if we get that number down to even 90% I think that will be a triumph for the human soul.

For some people, I do understand, the objections are deontological: in that case, obviously the consequences don't matter, it is better to have no art than to use something you believe is wrong. But for those without deontological objections it's surely a question of "what would have happened instead", and so often the alternative to AI art is no art, not human art. It's important to me to figure out how to make sure that the short-term use of AI doesn't lead to long-term atrophy of the human willingness or ability to create, but that's a question of strategy. If we're going down, I plan to go down singing.

cf Dynomight, Blink if you're human