2026-03-11 19:11:50
As best I can tell, there are truly only five options for how to react if there's a mismatch between what you want & what you have:
I suppose the first two are better if you can manage them, but I also suspect that most people live in one of the last three.
2026-03-09 19:37:22
If you can touch-type at 100% of speaking speed, you can transcribe notes while people are talking. You won't miss anything and you don't have to make decisions: you just type what you're hearing, while you're hearing it.
If you can touch-type at 95% speed, your experience is qualitatively rather than quantitatively different. You keep missing things, and then you either skip certain phrases or you miss what the speaker is saying while you're catching up on typing what they said previously. It feels like treading water, rather than swimming.
Similarly, I'm told by the Getting Things Done crew that if you set up an organizational system where you're 100% sure that anything you need to do is definitely in your to-do system, you can attain a kind of inner bliss and free up the 10% of your brain that is constantly asking itself: "wait, am I forgetting something?"
In some sense, even being 99% organized is experientially closer to 95 than to 100 – you still have to run that separate, internal am i forgetting something? loop, you'll just less-often come up with something you've forgotten.
If you have weeds in your garden and you eliminate 95% of them, the weeds will grow back. If you eliminate 100% (and so do your neighbours, etc) you've saved yourself from ever dealing with them again.
Alas, infectious diseases have a similar dynamic: the benefits of globally eradicating a disease are very meaningfully larger than the benefits of getting even 99.999% close.
If you have a hole in your bucket, the water's gonna come out. Even if it's a small hole, over enough time all of the water's gonna come out. You really want your bucket to be 100% bucket.
By contrast, many other things in the world don't have this dynamic: doing them 95% is at least 95% as good as doing 100%, and frankly often that last 5% is just not worth the effort. Heck, famously, many things in the world are structured such that doing them 20%-ly gets you 80% of the benefits.
The examples above are in some sense the opposite – they're 20/80s, where doing 80% of the work gets you only 20% of the benefit. I wonder: what propert(ies) makes certain kinds of Things acquire much of their benefit only if you do them 100%, and far less benefit if you do even-slightly less?
2026-03-05 03:27:03
New Yorkers: come hear me talk about hiccups at the excellent Nerd Nite.
Some of the hardest problems in life are where the tools you usually use to fix things are themselves the thing that's broken: your tools are broken so you cannot fix your tools.
Many mental health conditions have this issue: your brain is what you use to evaluate and understand stuff. If you have a condition that means you don't trust your brain's evaluations, how do you fix things? You can try to develop meta-awareness – "I am not my thoughts," "you don't have to believe all your thoughts" – but ultimately you still need to figure out which of your thoughts you do trust. For example, should you believe the thought "you don't have to believe all your thoughts"? The whole thing is very hard to do when you don't trust the tool you use for trusting.
Similarly, the main way we fix interpersonal issues is through conversation. What do you do if you're in relationship with another person and for whatever reason you're conversationally misaligned? Your conversational misalignment means you can't fix your conversational misalignment, and that makes it hard to fix anything else.
My favourite comedy writer is a guy called James Mickens – once styled The Funniest Man At Microsoft Research, and this may be still be true although I think he no longer works at Microsoft Research. He once wrote a piece about systems programmers, the people who write the fundamental code that everyone else's less-fundamental code goes on top of, and from which I stole the name of this post:
As I paced the hallways, muttering Nixonian rants about my code, one of my colleagues from the [Human Computer Interface] group asked me what my problem was. I described the bug, which involved concurrent threads and corrupted state and asynchronous message delivery across multiple machines, and my coworker said, “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you checked the log files for errors?” I said, “Indeed, I would do that if I hadn’t broken every component that a logging system needs to log data. I have a network file system, and I have broken the network, and I have broken the file system, and my machines crash when I make eye contact with them. I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS.”
Is there any solution to this? Any way to fix your tools when you've destroyed the tools you use to fix things?
p.s.:
2026-03-02 19:51:06
I once pre-booked an Uber ride, and when the driver arrived he explained that he'd had to log off for 30 mins in the middle of the day in order to be allowed to take this ride in the evening, because the app has a maximum daily shift length of 12 hours before it locks the drivers out. Hey, safety first right? Driving can be dangerous, and tired drivers make more mistakes.
Meanwhile, your literal doctors are allowed to work 28 hours straight.
Here are some rules (apparently) from different professions for maximum shift lengths:
| Profession | Max Continuous Shift |
|---|---|
| Airline Pilots | 8–9 Hours (flying time) |
| Truck Drivers | 11–14 Hours |
| Doctors (Residents) | 28 Hours |
Three things should stand out to you here:
1) Doctors are allowed to work 28 continuous hours
2) But only the Residents
3) This is bananas
I'm currently reading a book called Sleep Groove (v good, recommended). Among many interesting and unexpected points, it makes the entirely predictable point that people perform worse on all kinds of tasks when they haven't slept enough. The decline is really, really sharp and the trough is really, really low.
Why are doctors allowed these shift-lengths? I have heard two opposite explanations, both of them bad:
I just want to be clear that, whyever the current situation persists, I don't think it should be allowed to. We have both internal and external evidence that people make bad decisions when tired, and (crucially) that they don't know in the moment that they're making bad decisions when tired. We don't trust drunk people when they say "I'm totally fine, I can drive!" because the same thing that impairs their judgment is also impairing their meta-judgment about the impairdness of their judgment. Similarly, we shouldn't trust doctors who say that they're fine to work on limited sleep, no matter how much we love and appreciate doctors more generally.
The main argument used in favour of long shifts is "continuity of care", i.e. that it's better for a patient to see the same doctor continuously and prevent "handover errors", where something in the treatment goes wrong because information got lost when going from one doctor to the next.
I'm sorry, but this is the kind of process problem that the modern world is actually good at solving. I haven't worked at a hospital and I'm not saying the solution here is easy, but the solution is some version of "develop a procedure which standardizes the way that information about patients is handed over from one doctor to the next, minimizing error."
Of course, hospitals already have such procedures because shifts still end and handovers are still done; the only question is where to make the tradeoffs between "more handovers" and "sleepier doctors."
I am extremely grateful that doctors exist, they do a very difficult job and I celebrate them for doing it. But I fear we've got in a situation where the difficulty and importance of the job itself creates a taboo against other people having an opinion about it, which feels wrong. As mentioned, I'm not actually clear that the doctors who work 28 hour shifts even want to be doing that, or if it's enforced on them by a cartel of their elders who entirely control their job prospects, in which case it's extra-good for outsiders to speak up and help shift the equilibrium. But even if it's the case that doctors (overall) prefer to work fewer, longer shifts, that doesn't mean it's a good outcome. Patients – which, of course, ultimately includes doctors and their families too – shouldn't tolerate it.
2026-02-25 19:44:23
Over the last year I met a few incredibly boring people who all reminded me very strongly of each other. This got me thinking: taxonomically, what defines this particular boring archetype? In some sense the answer is just "not reading the room" – my definition of boring is "someone who talks at me, at length, without listening to me, and indifferent to my disinterest." But what are the more specific components?
Drone-y delivery. The delivery is important because it must never be clear to the listener when a story is going to end, and the listener must never really be situated in the story: they should be unsure moment-to-moment where in the arc of the story they are. This generates a kind of internal frustration beyond the pain of listening to someone monologue in general. The effect is achievable through a "classically boring" monotone, but it's also possible through a kind of Scandinavian-style lilt where you're just constantly uncertain where you are in a sentence or paragraph.
Quoted Speech. I'm not sure why this is such a commonality, but these people always insert extensive quoted speech into what they're saying, in a way that I rarely hear from anybody else. E.g. "So then Jo says, I think it's time to go to the bus, and I say, Yes you're probably right, and she says But we're not going to make it unless we run, and I said You are so right Jo, it's five minutes away and we're six minutes away from it."
I guess the meta-reason this is boring is because they could easily have synthesized this information ("So then we ran for the bus"), and the exact words someone used are rarely interesting unless they're really excellent words, so using this much quoted speech is normally an embodiment of "enjoying the sound of one's own voice + not really caring about the listener's experience," hence boring. But it's still striking to me that extensive reported speech is so prevalent in the boring community and rare outside it (though it's possible that interesting people are doing it too, but I fail to notice that because it makes sense in context and is interesting).
Fractal stories. This one I will really struggle to render, but I think it might be key. Every one of these people has a super-human ability to nest stories inside other stories, "My cousin Larry used to live near Tucson – his daughter went to school with Amanda Grayson, who was really quite short, she could barely reach over the counter at the grocery store, she used to have to shout up from behind the counter it's me, Amanda, is anyone there?, and..."
As I said, it's incredibly hard to render this pattern accurately but I think it might be the most important part of this unique archetype. I have met other boring people who are boring in other ways, but to me this archetype is DEFINED by the incredible ability to contain infinite stories within each of their stories. None of the stories have satisfying or interesting conclusions, and as a listener you're constantly in a state of uncertainty and anxiety since you're constantly in the middle of a series of open loops (which of course is compounded by patented Drone-y Delivery). The speaker flows through an infinite list of opened parentheses, occasionally closing some of them but always leaving more still open, giving their speech a remarkable texture and (of course) making it entirely uncompilable for the listener.
I think the difficulty of rendering this speaking style shows what a talent this is: like being a talk radio host, people think "I could do that!" but you cannot, it takes a kind of genius/and or extensive practice.
NOTE WELL: I am extremely worried that publishing this might put the exact wrong idea in the exact wrong people's heads, i.e. I worry that some not-boring people will read this and think I'm talking about them because e.g. they occasionally tell nested stories, or occasionally quote someone else's speech.
The main things I want to say to this are 1) if you're worried it's probably not about you, because the people who do this don't seem to have any concern at all about whether other people are interested in what they're saying, and 2) it's impossible to be boring in this way if you take up 1/n of the conversational space in an n person conversation.
I had a dear friend once who thought of himself as boring, and I was like "...clearly you're not?" Basically, from the inside he felt like he rarely had anything interesting to say, but then if he didn't have interesting things to say he didn't say them, so from outside he seemed a bit quiet, but never boring.
Meanwhile the most boring people I know consistently take up a disproportionate share of talking-space, they do not stop talking when other people try to talk, and for reasons quite beyond me seem to think everyone wants to hear them talking all the time – I assume their conceptualization of this is somehow completely orthogonal, they think they're the life of the party or something, that if they didn't tell their marvelous stories then everyone else would get bored. Essentially, being boring is a power move and that is actually one of the reasons I hate it. Point being: if you listen to other people and let them talk a roughly equal amount as you do, this post is not about you.
2026-02-23 19:11:43
If you're hunting for a new apartment in a place like New York City, you quickly come to feel in your bones that the market is pretty efficient. You want a low price for a large space and to be right near the subway, and so does everybody else, so that kind of apartment is not available on the open market: if a place is large and cheap then it's far from transit, and if it's cheap and near transit then it's small, and if it's cheap and large and near transit then there is something horrifically wrong with it (like the building I looked at which had deafening all-day construction noise outside, and a strangely optimistic realtor who told me I could solve this by buying a white noise machine). As a dear friend of the blog likes to say, bargains are bargains for a reason.
As a result, at some point in the apartment-hunt, the smart thing to do is start asking not "what would I ideally like in an apartment?," but "what do I care about less than other people do."
If you realise that you're out at work all day and won't get to see the view anyway, you can get a place with a bad view that is therefore better on size/cost/location than it would be otherwise.
Or if you don't care about "luxury building" amenities, like having a doorman or an in-building gym, you can get a better price by looking at buildings without those things. (I actively prefer not-having a doorman, for inverse Confucian reasons).
Eventually, you'll visit an apartment and think: ok, I understand why this place is priced lower than the size and location imply, and the thing that makes it worth less on the market is not as big of an issue for me as for the average renter, so this place is a bargain for me.
(There is still a decent chance you're about to get a terrible deal for reasons you didn't understand, and then spend the next year of your life regretting it, but at least there's some chance you're getting a bargain on your own terms).
Here's the point where I say something that takes economic principles and applies them to social life, to which some % of people will say "oh yes of course that makes sense," and another % of people will say "this is monstrous and you should be banned from society."
Namely: the same applies to people.
There is not an efficient market in friends or lovers, but there is some kind of market and some amount of efficiency. "Everyone" wants a tall and rich and handsome husband, so mostly it's the same deal as the apartments: if you meet a man who's tall and rich he won't be handsome, if he's rich and handsome he won't be tall, and if he's all three then there's something else horrifically wrong with him (e.g. he's a blogger).
The same goes with friendships. There are some traits that rub a lot of people up the wrong way, but are not (I'd argue) necessary friendship deal-breakers – for example, arrogance. Some arrogant people are still smart and interesting, they're just annoying and pompous about it. If you're unusually unbothered by arrogance, you can get a great friend "at a discount" – they have more time for you because other people don't want to hang out with them, so you get a great and interesting friend at a bargain for you.