Atoms vs BitsModify

2026-11-06 00:11:00

I love boardgame product development: it's one of the knottiest human psychology problems I've ever worked on, where the problem is "how do I put a set of objects and words into a box such that when people open it it will reliably generate specific emotions or experiences?"[^1]

Which leads to some weird challenges, like:

• early in the process, many boardgame prototypes are actively not enjoyable to play, and it's very hard to guess which of them have that necesarry grain of enjoyment in them if you just changed the setup slightly, and which of them are fundamentally not-good and never will be. You kind of have to sit there thinking e.g. "I'm not having fun, but is there any part of this that could theoretically become fun?" Which is like dissecting jokes, it is itself not-fun.
• as the designer, while testing, you are simultaneously experiencing two very different things: 1) the actual experience of the game in its current state, and 2) your own tired and complicated relationship to the thing you made. The upshot is that at some points you will inevitably not be enjoying yourself regardless of how good the game is. So you have to figure out whether you're not enjoying the game because of your current difficult Creator Relationship with it, or because it's not currently working, which feels like.... speculating at the hypothetical existence of fun the way that astronomers find stars by the way they affect other distant bodies.
• A large part of the design problem (especially for light/party games) is "when people encounter these objects for the first time, what will they assume you're supposed to do with them? How can I maximize the chances that whatever-they-do-with-them will be enjoyable?" It's unbelievably hard to write fully-clear rules in a rulebook.... and my sense is that most party game players don't actually read rulebooks anyway. Which means that the most useful testing experience is an infinite stream of people who have never encountered the game before, because once people know anything they know too much. I do think the ideal boardgame designer would be someone who's willing to approach endless strangers in the street and ask them to Try Something For Me, but if you're not that person you're in a bit of a pickle.

I suspect that other types of product development have analogous problems, but this one is mine. I don't think everyone should design a boardgame because I don't think everyone should do anything, but I do think boardgame design provides a pretty insightful experience of the problem of human communication: how do I cause other people, who I'll never directly speak to and who have infinite different lives, to do particular things, predictably?

[^1]: one of those emotions is Fun/Enjoyment, but there are many others that also work great

2026-11-04 00:11:00

If you've ever had a friend write a traditionally-published book, you will inevitably have gotten an email asking you to PLEASE preorder the book because 1) bookstores choose what to stock based on order numbers, 2) pre-orders count as first-week sales, so they're the book's best shot to get onto a bestseller list.

I try my best to contribute whenever this happens, because I want my friends to succeed, but I have to admit I feel pretty salty about it. One reason is that I don't actually want a hardback, and it costs $32, and 90% of that goes to the publisher/retailers/etc, so on the material side of the transaction I'm spending $32 to send my pal $3 for an object I don't actually want. I wish I could just give my friend $20 and then buy the e-book version for $12, but so it goes.

But even more than that, I feel salty because Publishers pester authors about how important pre-orders are, they make authors email all their friends and relations to do this "please pre-order my book" thing, and in return they are willing to give ABSOLUTELY LITERALLY NOTHING.

At the absolute bare minimum, pre-ordering a book should get me a 10% discount on list price. I know at this level it doesn't really matter economically but... you are asking me to tie up my money 6 months in advance, it is historically just a norm across most industries that if you ask someone to pre-pay you have to offer a cheaper price for it. But obviously it's not about the money, it's about the vibe: you are asking me to do a thing that helps you out and gives me 0 benefit, can you please just make a minimal good-will gesture so I can feel good about the interaction? This is 0% the author's faults, so I do it anyway, but it makes it way harder to be excited about helping.

And that gets at the real core of the problem: rather than making me feel Part Of Something, Publishers make me feel taken-advantage-of for trying to participate in supporting a book. It seems to me that Publishers could massively benefit themselves by treating pre-order customers with a bit more graciousness. Kickstarter is a very successful business model for many reasons, one of which is that if a person feels like a (small but real) part of the development of a project, they are way more invested in it and excited to help promote it.

There is no obvious reason why big publishers couldn't have a special pre-order platform where you pre-order books (at a small discount) and get made to feel like a Friend and Supporter, and then I'm pretty sure you'd be more likely to tell other people about the book and encourage them to buy it too. And this would not only help that specific book but allow publishers to build an email list of high-value Supporters, which would help them sell more books in the future.

One of the strangest parts of this is that it's not even clear to me that a discount Supporter Tier would need to cost Publishers any money! See, most Stuff Online is sold through Amazon [citation needed], but most sellers make higher margins when they sell directly. Amazon normally makes it approximately impossible to sell a good from your own online store for less than the Amazon price, and since Amazon has super-fast shipping and extremely easy checkout, it's hard to offer a workable incentive to customers for buying from your own store even when that greatly increases your profit margin. (I think Amazon's Most Favoured Nation Clause is one of the defining features of modern commerce, a huge chunk of dark matter warping everything else in online shopping – I will write more about this another day).

Anyway! To the best of my knowledge, pre-orders could just completely get around this problem because Amazon is matching a product's current price, not the ever-used price. So Publishers could do a one-month Supporter Pre-order window where people can buy from their own platform at a discount, ideally get some other warm fuzzy perk as well, and then once the window is over the book goes up for pre-order on Amazon etc at the normal price. They'd even get my email address in the process, which is valuable for future sales and which Amazon doesn't give them!

Publishers: please! I'm begging you, think about the psychology of this thing. Let me feel good about doing a thing I already want to do, and develop an actual relationship with me that you could profit from in the long run, rather than making me feel like a useless chump who's being cornered into giving an interest-free loan to a billion-dollar company in order to do my pal a favour.

2026-11-02 23:11:00

Can anyone explain to me exactly what people mean when they say "live as if you'll die tomorrow?"

If I knew for sure I was dying tomorrow I probably wouldn't sleep tonight, I would eat the most outrageously decadent food I wanted, I wouldn't do my laundry no matter HOW much laundry was piled up.....

I think the thing we should mostly do is live as if you have [your statistically probable remaining years of life left], but with high uncertainty, and if there's things you wish you'd do some day you should probably start planning immediately and start on them sooner than you think, because it's easy for time to go by and to keep delaying on stuff that's good but scary.

At the same time, some of the important stuff in life takes many years to do, which is fine, because you're very unlikely to die tomorrow, and you shouldn't act as if you will.

Unfortunately, that does also mean that you need to do your laundry.

I know I'm being overly literal somehow, and I know the general sense of the quote is just "avoid procrastination and prioritize what really matters."

But I think there's much better ways to convey those messages, and I feel like it must be communicating something to people that's going over my head. So if you can explain it, please do.

2026-10-29 23:11:00

This is mostly a post to say: did you know you can get a continuous blood glucose monitor for $50 for 2 weeks, without prescription?

My personal experience with it was a bit like Craig Venter, pioneer of DNA mapping, said of seeing his personal sequenced genome:

"It's not a 'so what,' but it's certainly not 'Aha!' either"

That is, I was hoping to get some major revelations from the monitoring, to discover that bread or dairy or something spikes my blood sugar unexpectedly, and therefore have a big impact on my future life and diet.

And hey, other people might have this experience!, especially if their diet is more sugar-spikey than mine – e.g. I'm told that people are sometimes shocked to discover how much a bowl of fruit for breakfast spikes their blood sugar.

Instead, I personally got a series of mild hmmms:

• walking around a bit immediately after eating really does seem to reduce blood sugar spikes
• blood sugar spikes are a complicated combination of the foods you eat, so it's not as simple as "toast = this much, egg = that much, toast + egg = this + that much"
• my intuitive sense of what a "blood sugar spike" and a "blood sugar crash" feel like, bodily, was pretty wrong
• if your blood sugar crashes overnight (per your monitor), that might be a real thing but also you might just be sleeping on the monitor weird
• logging what you eat all the time is extremely annoying

Overall, I mildly recommend trying it for two weeks if you're interested, it's a low-cost experiment that could have some a-has for you, or at least some u-hmms. Mostly I'm just pleased that this device is available for consumers over the counter at a seemingly-reasonable price, and wanted to tell you in case you didn't know either.

2026-10-27 23:11:00

Please note the title is How I Lost Weight (apply to yourself as relevant) not How To Lose Weight in some universal sense, your mileage may vary.

0. losing (some) weight is a reasonable and fun goal for many people, and a source of enormous suffering for other people, and if you're in the latter camp please ignore this whole post if it causes you any stress whatsoever. I know this is easy for me to say but having a healthy relationship to your food and your body seems on average more important than being a specific weight. As always, if you're struggling with this (or anything in your life) and you feel like I can be helpful, please email me, genuinely.
   
   
1. It was kind of sad and funny in the end how much changing my diet led straightforwardly to losing weight.
   
   Crucially, I stopped buying/storing bread or cheese in the house; tragically, this seems to be very effective. It turns out 1 normal pita has 10% of my daily calorie needs and is not very filling, and cheese is extremely delicious and not very satiating, and I just can't control myself if I have access to these foods.
   
   I started making sure most of my food was high protein and/or high fiber. I still eat a good amount of fat as long as it's in a food that has high protein as well (e.g. eggs, nuts, etc), but I try not to go overboard. I try to limit simple carbs and sugars. I've tried to cut back on sugary drinks and baked goods like croissants, which bring a lot of calories and little satiety.
   
   That's it! I don't count calories and I still have treats, especially outside the house. At restaurants I will eat bread and cheese and other delicious things, and at friends' houses I eat what I feel like without asking questions, etc.
   
   This all seems very obvious, now, but I genuinely didn't know beforehand it would work, so it feels useful to say that it worked.
   
   
2. I tried to exercise more: a combination of regular classes + walking more steps.
   
   For walking, I got a $100 under-desk walking pad (not literally this one, but similar) and try to get ~8k+ steps every day, either treadmill or irl. Depending on the day I either try to do a 1000 steps (about 10 mins walk) every hour or two throughout the day, or to knock out 30+ mins while watching a show or listening to a podcast.
   
   I do notice that when I walk around in the city I can easily hit 14k steps without really trying, but that walking on the treadmill feels like a chore regardless of how I do it, I'm not honestly sure why that is.
   
   
3. I weigh myself every morning, and sometimes later in the day as well. I think subconsciously this causes me to make better eating decisions. However, it's EXTREMELY important to realise that your weight can easily fluctuate up to ~5lb in a single day, let alone over a week or more, and to not take the individual changes too seriously since a lot of them are water etc. (Fun ~fact: you can lose 0.3lb overnight just from breathing out C02, crazy).
   
   
4. My partner is extremely supportive and wonderful and made it very easy to stock our home with healthy foods. I feel like this is a huge benefit and sometimes underrated by people who have it, but it would be so much harder to eat well if my pantry and/or social life was full of temptations all the time.
   
   
5. I really prioritize getting sleep. I can't prove it but I'm convinced this is related to weight loss and muscle gain.
   
   
6. My life is (thank God) not too stressful right now. A fitness influencer I follow says that you need to have 3 levels of fitness plan: one for everyday life, one for weekends and holidays etc, and one for those times when your life is completely falling apart. You can easily gain back a lot of weight / lose a lot of muscle in a short amount of time when the occasional inevitable catastrophe hits you, and he says you need a plan for those times so that you can follow a less-strict regimen that keeps your existing progress even though you won't make more progress right then.
   
   I thankfully haven't yet had any life-falling-apart experiences since I started losing weight again, so I don't honestly know if I'll keep it up when I do, which seems important to acknowledge.
   

Overall the biggest cost of weight-loss for me has been time: I'd guess I'm spending up to 2h each day on average between exercise, recovery, and extra sleep? A lot of that is enjoyable for me, and it's possible I get some back in terms of extra energy and focus, but it's a significant cost regardless. In some sense it's nice to know that losing weight is yet-another genuine tradeoff in life, you pay a cost and get a benefit, it's not a magic trick.

Still and all, it's kind of crazy to me that you can just... decide to lose weight, and then do the relatively obvious straightforward weight-losing things in a serious but not obsessive way, and that it can work. To the extent you're also surprised to learn this, I hope the knowledge helps.

2026-10-26 23:11:00

There's a podcast I listened to for professional reasons where I really disliked one of the co-host's vibes, mainly because he kept talking over the other co-host in a way I found unpleasant and which I associate with assholes who do far worse things as well.

These guys were clearly friends, and the second guy (evidently) didn't mind the talking-over, or didn't mind it enough to stop being friends at least.

I found myself mulling how one "ought" to react to such a thing, since:

1) there's a danger of ignoring your inner voice that warns you someone is bad news.

2) there's a danger of unfairly judging someone, and assuming bad things about them which you really don't have evidence for.

3) there's a danger of letting your desire not to unfairly judge someone override your to your inner voice that warns you they are bad news.

Of course "should I listen to this podcast, and how should I feel about its hosts?" is the lowest possible stakes for this conundrum. My dear friend S once recommended a related book, but I admit I haven't yet got around to reading it. Does anyone have a smart solution for steering between this scylla and charbydis?