2026-07-27 19:11:05
We're in a weird place with AI now where some people are doing 1000x more with it and also 85% of people don't use it at all. I really don't know where any of youse are on this, so I don't know how useful it is for me to suggest AI things to try.
Still, in case it's useful: if you're AI-curious but not sure where to start, one suggestion I have is AskMaps on Googlemaps. AI is good at a few different things, but one of them is searching a messy and unstructured heap of data in a way that wasn't possible before. Maps is a great way to have that experience as an entry point to figuring out what AI is/isn't useful for.
For example, you can ask the AI questions like "I'm driving from Philly to Johnson City, what cool attractions are there along the way? I like quirky museums and bizarre roadside monuments". The AI will give you a shockingly good answer; I and mine have been to several awesome places this way.
You can also ask it things like "what cool events are happening near me today? I'm interested in country music and acrobatics" and it will likewise give you a surprisingly good result.
The crux here is that all this information already existed in the ether, but there was no way I could realistically sift through it previously, so I missed out on lots of events and activities I would otherwise have enjoyed. Maybe if I was on holiday I would spend 3 hours looking up things to do each day, and click through all the different web pages to find out which things are closed on Tuesdays and which special events are happening just tonight. But realistically I wasn't going to do that on Sunday morning when I'm like "I have two spare hours now, is there anything happening near me?"
Once the cost to search this messy data goes down from 3 hours of your effort to 3 mins, you unlock the ability to do things you couldn't previously. What new things are possible that weren't previously once all map and event data are meaningfully searchable?
And then: what other areas of life are like this, where a bunch of messy data existed but it wasn't practically worthwhile to search it, and now it might be?
This AskMaps trick has had a very meaningful impact on my life already, because I did literally ask it "are there any exercise classes happening near me today" and ended up with a class starting 30 mins later and a new hobby. As usual, I think it's important that while you can certainly use AI to fall into a hole of alienation from your fellow humans, it is also possible to use it to connect with other humans much better, and on an individual level that's (at least for now) a choice you can make by how you use it.
My usual caveat: if you think AI is evil, none of this applies to you! It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for all the world, so certainly not for "fun things to do next week on my roadtrip Wales." But if you don't have deontological objections and just don't know where to start with AI, here's a place to start.
2026-07-24 19:11:04
Look this is just a question I have: why does an hour of certain kinds of flexibility/stretching exercises – such as barre, yoga, pilates – make you sleepy?
Obviously strenuous exercise (like running a marathon) can make you tired, but this is different – if you play it right I think you can get this sleep-inducing effect without even breaking a sweat, and it's very specifically sleepy/drowsy rather than exhausted-from-exertion.
It really feels like it's tied to the stretching or movement, somehow. I think I have this experience more often when I go to a new class after a while and have that "wow we are stretching muscles I had forgotten existed" feeling, though there's so many things going on there that I might well be misunderstanding.
I'm pretty sure I've only had this experience in group classes? Which is probably just because I push myself harder there than when practicing things alone, but you could come up with other stories about the social element I suppose.
Mythopoetically it really does feel like there are certain sensations trapped in our joints?fascia?lymphnodes?nerves, and that if you stretch and move in a novel way you can crack open a trapped tube of sleep-hormones and release it all at once, like turning your pants upside down and having a bunch of coins fall out of tiny side-pocket.
I have asked various people about this over the years, and some of those people have had theories, but I don't get the sense that there's a known answer to this. So if you have an answer, or a barmy speculation, please do let me know.
2026-07-22 19:11:16
There's basically various ratios at which someone else can trade their wellbeing for you own.
There are people who seemingly care ~0 about your wellbeing, only their own; they would happily steal your $1000 suit to use as a floor rag, because the 0.1 units of value they get from that is worth more to them than the 1000 units of value you lose by losing it.
There are other people who are too self-sacrificing: you ask if they have a kleenex and they give you their silk tie. I'm not sure why but this is also very bothersome, to me at least.
I'm totally speculating here but maybe the common amount is for people to care about themselves about ~2x as much as the people around them. These are the people who will cut ahead of you in line (or something) – the benefit they get from that is 1:1 with the benefit lost by everyone else combined – but they wouldn't steal your sentimental watch.
I suspect the most charming conversion rate that someone can use is roughly one-to-one: they basically consider your well-being as much as they consider their own, but not more. I'm not sure that's true, but intuitively it feels true.
2026-07-21 19:11:10
If you're enjoying the blog, I'd be grateful if you'd answer this question I have about how people experience the world, and then predict how other people will answer the question.
All will be revealed soon-ish, promise.
2026-07-20 19:11:19
I have no affiliation with The Original Korcci Microwaveable Silicone Popcorn Popper, No Oil Required, Use In Microwave, Dishwasher Safe (Blue). I say this not as a disclosure, but as a lament. Oh, how I wish my name might share glory with this vessel of silicone and spirit! A good name is better than good oil, says the preacher, but this popcorn doesn't require oil, and therefore its macros are impeccable.
I got the idea of eating more popcorn from a twitter post about some hot old-time actor, I think it was Robert Redford, and how he ate tons of popcorn because it's very filling without being calorific. I just looked it up and apparently there was an entire Popcorn Diet in the 80s, so it's not just him. Look, I don't think you should replace all your meals with popcorn but if you're comparing it with e.g. commercial breakfast cereal there's really no competition:
I do really enjoy how the fiber in popcorn is, you know, experientially integral to the food itself: when you eat fiber-fortified cereals it's somehow obvious that the fiber was isolated from one source and pressed into another, but with popcorn it's like, yeah!, I just ate a piece of hull.
One thing I find kind-of-funny, kind-of-sad is how what we even think to do is constrained by social mores. "I eat popcorn for breakfast" is a weird sentence, I feel weird even typing it, I don't blame you for judging me. And yet "I eat rice krispies for breakfast" is a completely normal sentence that a respectable bourgeois citizen could utter without remorse and yet WHAT IS A RICE KRISPIE MY FRIEND? We do not own ourselves.
Did you know you can pop other grains in your Korcci Oil-Free Microwave Popcorn Popper? Apparently you can pop amaranth, and quinoa, and sorghum, among others. I will try these and report back.
2026-07-17 19:11:11
In modern American politics, centristically-inclined voters have an interesting problem: basically every election will be won by a candidate from one of two parties, and those candidates are chosen by each party's partisans, and as a result the candidates are more extreme than the median voter's preferences.
So e.g. if you're a center-left voter you'd prefer to have a far-left candidate to a far-right one, but you'd prefer a center-left candidate to either, and that isn't always within your option-set by the time the election rolls around.
In theory, the general election itself should pull both candidates back towards the center, but some combination of gerrymandering and fundraising and social pressure mean that doesn't always happen in practice either. What can I say? None of us truly know where the center is, but when I look at current American politics I don't think "wow there is such an oversupply of boring centerists."[^1]
Is there anything you can do about that? You can try to elect centerists in the primary, of course, but suppose that hasn't happened yet. What else?
Well, here's an idea I haven't heard talked about: what would happen if a meaningful share of voters promised to split their ticket in every election, i.e. to vote for just as many Republicans as Democrats in the election? Essentially, if the upcoming election is for President and House and Senate and Dogcatcher, the voter says "I will pull for two Democrats and two Republicans among these four, everybody please do your best."
This theoretically would create intra-party competition to move to the center: the Democratic Senate candidate is no longer competing just against the Republican Senate candidate but also against the Democratic House candidate, and if I'm doing the maths vaguely right that "should" pull all the candidates from both parties towards the middle. (It's also a move that centerists are uniquely able to do: a hard-right or hard-left voter might credibly threaten not to vote, but they can't credibly threaten to vote for the opposite wing, no matter how much it sharpens the contradictions).
There's obviously several issues with this proposal.
First, I'm not sure how you could possibly convince either party that enough of you were doing this to move votes.
Second, I'm not sure how many voters there are who are genuinely hand-on-heart willing to vote for both parties, or treat their own vote instrumentally in this particular way.[^2]
Third, to the extent that you're center-left or center-right rather than truly at the center of the current political spectrum, strictly voting for equal numbers of Rs and Ds might be sacrificing some of your short-term policy preferences.
More generally, I'm not sure what the long run equilibrium of this voting style would be; part of me thinks it would drag the long-term policy equilibrium to the center as well, but this stuff is really hard to calculate.
Still, I think in theory it would be an interesting thing for people to do, and striking that nobody (to my knowledge) does it.
[^1]: eh, look, this is all complicated: there's (at least) three ways to be considered "centerist": one is to hold the median position on every topic, one is to hold an unpredictable collection of positions such that nobody can easily place you on right or left, a third is to have a moderate vibe while doing whatever it is you want ideologically.
[^2]: people are willing to vote instrumentally in MANY other ways! "Hold your nose and vote for X"; "Vote for the crook, it's important!"; "Vote for the lesser of two evils" are all instrumental views of voting that people seem to tolerate, if not enjoy.