2026-04-20 19:11:42
Heads up in advance: I don't know what the moral of this story is, or whether it's worth reading for most people, but sharing this anyway in case it helps anyone. In order not to clickbait you, I'll say upfront that the reason for the net-goodness is just that I'm a phone addict, so having my phone break and become unusable for a time was probably good for my brain.
Ok, so, there were two reasons I bought a refurbished iPhone in the first place:
1) As a young bundle of atoms I made the mistake of reading a lot of pop econ books, and one of the things I internalized was that people irrationally optimize for saving money on small purchases ("which of these tins of tomato should I get, this one looks better but is $1 more!") and then end up spending huge amounts when making expensive purchases because they've already anchored on a high number so what's another $100 (or three).
2) I really, really like being able to hold my phone in one hand; for me, the iPhone SE (4.7" screen) was the perfect form factor, but Apple decided to discontinue that whole lineage in 2022, and then also the the line of the 5.4" 13mini in 2023. I'm not at all an Apple loyalist, but the situation for Androids is roughly the same: big-phone enjoyers might not realise how difficult it is to get any modern phone smaller than 6".
I was pretty unsure about this decision, because part of me thought that the peace of mind of buying a brand-new phone would be worth the extra cost, but my inability to buy a small phone from any marquee brand pushed me to take a risk on a refurbished 13mini.
I inevitably spent way too much time looking at options – the internet is full of I Bought A Refurbished Phone And My Face Got Eaten By A Bear stories – but I figured that was selection bias. One great thing about buying a new phone direct from a marquee brand is that it reduces decision fatigue, because at least you know where you're buying it from, but second hand doesn't have this advantage and the internet is also full of I Bought A Phone From [Name Of Second Hand Market Place] And Got Eaten By A Bear, Again stories.
After (again) wasting an irrational amount of time on research, I eventually went with a phone seller called Nexus Tech Solutions with a 5* physical location on googlemaps and who actually answered his phone and gave reasonable explanations to all questions.
For the first ~2 months everything was dandy and I thought I'd won this particular gamble. Then – as I'm wont to do – I dropped the phone on the floor, and the back smashed off completely. Reading about this online, I saw that a lot of people claimed that Original Apple Glass (TM) is designed not to crack that way, and it's mainly an issue with refurbished glass. The guy in Texas insisted the glass was original, and that he would replace it for me at a discount, but since the cost of repair was almost half the cost of the phone I figured it wasn't worth it. Somewhat miraculously, the phone kept working with only a cheap plastic Phone Back Protector to cover its innards.
A month later, my phone suddenly stopped being able to send or receive calls. There followed a truly incredible series of interactions with my carrier (T-Mobile) via their chat support that always went like
me: I am unable to receive or make calls
them: I'm sorry to hear that! I am calling you now to help out
me: I'm afraid that won't work, because the issue is precisely my inability to make or receive calls
them: I'm sorry to hear that! I have tried calling you and received your voicemail: can you please call us back?
me: I would dearly love to be able to do that, but as immediately just now mentioned, that is precisely the thing I cannot do
I eventually elliott.org-ed my way out of the problem and got T-Mobile's premium support, who told me that my phone had been excommunicated by its original carrier. They unfortunately could not tell me who the original carrier was, making it impossible for me to do anything about it.
As best I can tell, the likely situation is that my phone's original owner had bought it on credit and stopped paying, and ~6 months later the original network had therefore cut off the phone. Everything except the calling/texts still work fine, so e.g. I can use it on wifi for whatsapping and as an audiobook player, which is honestly not nothing but does not span the entirety of my telephonic needs.
The aforementioned Dylan at Nexus Tech, who had previously been so responsive, alas now ghosted me completely. Which I suppose, at least, is in fine phone-related tradition.
Anyway. I ordered a Unihertz Jelly Phone online, a conceptually-cool tiny android phone which unfortunately never arrived, one of the other qualities I generally appreciate in a phone, and whose manufacturer unfortunately refused to refund it for weeks after their mail carrier started showing DAMAGED: CONTACT SENDER. Eventually my loved one gave me a perfectly-functioning but for-me-large flagship Android, which has stayed with me to this day.
The silver lining of all this, as mentioned, was that I ended up spending a ~month without a functioning phone in the outside world: I basically just had to do stuff at home on wifi, and then commute etc phonelessly until I reached another wifi location. I was in an unusually deep phone-addiction hole at the time, and this inconvenience jammed me out of it, which was great. But it's hard to suppress the feeling that if a broken product is net-good for your life because it derails your addiction to said product, something is going really wrong for you in a way that's gone from "haha I'm soooo addicted to X" to "no really, I am addicted," hahalessly.
2026-04-17 19:11:48
For more than half my life, now, I've wanted to write a good pantoum.
It's bothered me for a long time that most of the famous pantoums in English are not good.[^1] This is in contrast to, say, the multiple phenomenal villanelles; I'm pretty sure I also read a good sestina once, but its identity is tragically escaping me now.
A pantoum is a type of poem based on the Malaysian pantun and with a very rigid repetitive structure: basically, the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third line of the next stanza, and so on. This is the source of the difficulty: each stanza can only introduce two new lines, and those need to be re-usable in the next stanza, without (ideally) sounding either boring, vague or clanky in their new positions.
Readers who hate LLMs please cover your eyes/nose now:
I turned to Claude. "Write a pantoum" has been my personal LLM benchmark for a while now, and whatever developmental leap Claude went through earlier this year means she is now able to write a surprisingly passable pantoum herself.[^2]
But she also gave me two gifts to help me pantoumime on my own behalf. First, she – largely under her own direction – designed this Pantoum Editor that lets you easily see which lines need to match, and where you currently have mismatches, and realign them. I'm really impressed with this product, you can try it for yourself here: http://www.marbiru.com/pantoum-editor.
She also had the patience to argue with me as I crafted the following folly. The first line has been in my head for a decade now, and the writing is all my own, but Claude provided the thing that neither I nor any other human could give me in the meantime, which is some bundle of conscientiousness/structure/motivation to get the thing done. I'll write about this some other time, but I think in some ways it's one of the most interesting use-cases of Claude these days (however long These Days lasts): an enforcement mechanism for people who struggle to enforce themselves.
Anyhow! I do not claim this is the good pantoum I dreamed of, but it does exist, and I'm glad for that.
Structured Poems
You don't write structured poems
because they're good;
you want to prove,
you can.
Because they're good
for nowt – wish
you can
amuse.
For now. Twish!
You want
a Muse,
yourself.
You want,
you want to prove
yourself.
(You don't write).
[^1]: basically: the easy way to write a pantoum is to just make each line vague and mysterious and not entirely grammatical to begin with, then interlock them. You know the kind of thing: "the sky hangs heavy like a labcoat / oh, the supple summon of the waves / my heart beats merry merry every morning / the time of our beginnings is awake." Then the next stanza can start "Oh, the supple summon of the waves:", and then more of the same, and it doesn't make any more or less sense than it did before. This (I'm sorry) is basically what I think of John Ashberry's Pantoum, unless there's something there I'm missing.
Another trick for easier pantouming is to make the subject be something that justifies the repetition. E.g. I think Baby's Pantoum by Anne Waldman is quite good, but it leans heavily on the conceit.
Many English pantoumists have simply agreed you're allowed to bend the words of the lines so long as they're roughly the same. e.g. Parents Pantoum by Carolyn Kizer. I don't understand this, if you relax the constraint you've lost the challenge? (Baby's pantoum cheats a bit as well, I think, but not as egregiously. Also, I am much more sympathetic to cheating slightly after fully internalising how hard it is to do properly).
A big shout out to Nocturne by Sadakichi Hartmann, which I find very pleasing, both because the repeated lines somehow feel altered by their new positions, and because the theme (boats on the water) fits well with the waves of repetition to begin with. Imho this is the best existing pantoum.
[^2]: Tide Work, by Claude
The harbor keeps its ledger in salt,
counting what the moon has loaned the shore.
Boats come back lighter than they left.
Nothing stays where you put it down.
Counting what the moon has loaned the shore,
the gulls audit each retreating wave.
Nothing stays where you put it down—
even the rocks are smaller by morning.
The gulls audit each retreating wave,
patient as bookkeepers in gray suits.
Even the rocks are smaller by morning,
worn to the shape of someone leaving.
Patient as bookkeepers in gray suits,
boats come back lighter than they left,
worn to the shape of someone leaving.
The harbor keeps its ledger in salt.
2026-04-16 19:11:11
Suppose you find out that someone you know did something horrific to someone else. The victim (understandably) doesn't want to go public. What should you do?
It's surprisingly hard for me to answer this question. Morally, the perpetrator should face consequences for their actions, but there's no obvious way to make that happen without also causing consequences for the victim. (I guess you could question the premise that the victim should be allowed to choose whether to go public, but I think the common agreement is that it's their right to choose).
To some limited extent, you can can tell individual other people about the situation, but (depending on context) there's a chance that this still risks outing the victim, and regardless you could only plausibly reach a tiny fraction of the people who need to know.
You can maybe hint vaguely about a person's untrustworthiness in public, but without a concrete reason this is unlikely to be persuasive in general.
I see a lot of stories in the news about people who have done terrible things finally being outed, and it's clear that some non-trivial set of people knew about the behaviour for a long time previously, and then the broader public (understandably) feels extremely upset that these people knew and yet did nothing.
To be explicitly clear, some of the people-who-knew also didn't want to do anything about it, even if they could. Which is its own kind of awful.
But as best I can tell, in many contexts, even if you badly want to do something about it, you can only really do anything once at least one victim is willing to go public, and until then.... you can only look on in horror? (Please tell me I'm missing something, I would badly love to be missing something).
2026-04-15 19:01:22
I think implicitly there are three models of love:
Model 1: you can be equally happy with a very wide range of people – you just need to spend time and grow together.
I think this is the implicit model behind arranged marriages: as long as you pick someone within the (large) pool of people you're basically compatible with it doesn't really matter who it is, you should just settle down with the first reasonable match you get and then do the work of growing to love each other.
(This surely varies by culture, but my understanding is that most modern arranged marriage cultures don't just say "you have to marry THIS person", you get offered matches and you're allowed a couple of "nos" before you say yes. Except that you know that if you say too many "nos" you'll be branded as difficult, so saying "no" is risky. But still, I think this matches the model described above: you're expected to act as if 50%+ of people in your pool are reasonable matches, but you don't have to act like 100% of the pool is good enough).
Model 2: there's a normal-ish distribution of how happy you'll be with different people: some people you'd be very unhappy with, many people you'd be vaguely-ok with, some people you'd be very happy with.
With a normal distribution the tails are very light. Imagine lining up 100 people in a row from the person least-compatible to most-compatible with you. The amount of benefit you get from going from the 50th-best person to the 20th-best is the same as the benefit of going from the 20th-best to the 5th-best, and the same as going from the 5th-best to the 2nd-best (roughly).
But the difficulty of getting that improvement increases each time: it's 2.5x harder to find the 20th best than the 50th best, and 4x harder to find the 5th best than the 20th best, and 8x harder to find the 2nd best than the 5th best.
Unlike the first model, it doesn't make sense to marry the first random person you meet: you really will be happier with your 5th-best person than your 20th-best. But if you're already dating your 5th-best, is it really worth holding out to find your 2nd-best? It depends on your values but I would argue "probably not", given the search costs and the risk of ending up alone.
I think this is, ultimately, the model that most modern WEIRDos have about dating, but would be interested to hear if you think otherwise.
Model 3: There's an extremely fat-tailed distribution of how happy you'll be with different people: the best person for you is meaningfully better than even the second-best person, let alone the 5th-best.
This is the "soulmate" or "one true love" model of relationships. Depending on the numbers, it probably does imply that even if you're currently dating the 2nd-best person for you, it can be worth the trouble to break up and keep searching for the 1st-best, because the happiness that awaits you is beyond comprehension.
The three models have very meaningful implications for how you should live your dating life: from "marry the first person you meet within the top half-ish of your distribution" to "probably hold out for someone 90th percentile or above, but don't fret about getting 99th" to "it is actually very important whether you marry your 99th percentile or 99.9999th percentile person, good luck!"
2026-04-14 19:11:25
James here, the periodic contributor to Atoms vs. Bits. Over the past couple of months, Uri and I have been working with our friend Dr. Dua Hassan on her podcast "Second Opinion with Dr. Dua Hassan".
Dua is a physician at Boston Children's hospital and in the show she takes the time to explain the "Why" behind different medical interventions that a baby or child goes through in a way that you never really have time for in the normal course of business.
The first season of the show is about the first 24 hours of life and the key interventions that most babies have: the Vitamin K shot, the Eye Goop, the PKU test, the Hep B shot, and the first feeding.
I've been through this first 24 hours three times as a father and I like to think of myself as prepared (I read the books before the first baby was born) and I learned a tremendous amount doing the show with Dua, both about the science and about how we decided what the standard protocol for babies should be. The real world is detailed and messy in delightful ways.
Worth checking out if you are a new parent, a soon-to-be parent, or just interested in learning about this corner of the world. You can find it on Spotify here, Apple Podcasts here, or on YouTube here.
2026-04-13 19:11:24
Every so often I'll meet someone who says how the country's problems could be solved if everyone had to do national service at age 18.
My first note is that it (unscientifically) feels to me like these people have never themselves done national service.
My second note is that they're always saying that young people should do national service, and they're always past the age where you'd have to do it.
So here's my proposal: mandatory two year national service, but you do it at age 50.
This would have a large number of benefits versus national service at 18:
1) many people get stuck on their career tracks, and want a "reset" but can't quite get one. Many people say "oh what I'd love to do now is just go become a teacher", but life goes on and you still need to show up at your current non-teacher job and there's never a good moment to retrain and start over. National service for 50 year olds would give an obvious moment for people to switch to a second career.
2) national service for 50 year olds would help disrupt some of our current gerontocracy issues: at a lot of organizations, the younger people never get a chance at management, and (hopefully) this would give some young talent the opportunity to step into bigger roles for a while and prove their capabilities. (I admit that in practice the 50 year olds would just get replaced temporarily by 80 year olds, then come back and reclaim their existing sinecures, but a guy can dream).
3) national service for 50 year olds would allow people to give back to their communities after they've actually developed skills and abilities: imagine how much more service you can serve if you've got 30 years of training and experience under your belt, versus an 18 year old with (at most) enthusiasm.
4) national service is many things, but one of those things is a near-100% tax on selected individuals: while you're doing national service you get paid little-to-nothing, and it's very hard to work elsewhere for money at the same, so it's equivalent to being taxed for almost-all your income for the duration.
Young people generally have less money (on average), and for low-income young people national service can be a really significant burden, delaying their ability to get on a career ladder and earn a reasonable income by multiple years. This is a component that the wealthy older people who (in my experience) advocate national service never seem to acknowledge, and frankly one reason why their blaséness about the whole proposal irks me. But if you believe in progressive taxation, and you're calling for a near-100% tax on anyone, it should obviously be richer people rather than poorer ones paying it.