03 July, 2025

My Father and the Withering of Liberal Zionism: Was my family’s dream of a Jewish socialist utopia all a lie?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ayelet-waldman-my-father-and-liberal-zionisms-downfall.html

I sat stunned. Raiding Arab villages long after the end of the war was not part of the picture of Zionist idealism my father had painted for me. During raids, Yosi said, young kibbutzniks would steal donkeys or other things in retaliation for similar thefts by the Arab villagers across the border in Gaza. These incursions and counter-incursions were not limited to thefts. There are stories of killings on both sides.

As a result of his experiences during the war, Yosi said, our father suffered for his entire life from untreated PTSD.

PTSD. It lands with a thud, at once shocking and so very obvious. My father’s silences, punctuated by bouts of rage. The jobs he lost, one after another, despite his magnetism and competence. The furious battles with my mother, which I had always blamed on her temper, her lack of control. I knew he had bipolar disorder, but I had not for a moment considered it was complicated by trauma. “It’s a very personal thing, being post-traumatic,” Yosi said. “Establishing a relationship that has emotions in it is very, very difficult. One of the most difficult things for post-traumatic syndrome people is to express their emotions. They close up, and they shut up.”

McDonald’s looks like it went from being a happy kid to a depressed adult like many of us….

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/1ixfzjc/mcdonalds_looks_like_it_went_from_being_a_happy/mem25fi/

u/TheAus10: "The reason all these fast food places are switching to buildings like this is because they're easier to sell if the businesses fail. Basically, when a McDonalds closes down and it looks like the 1st picture, a Taco Bell or Burger King (or some other fast food place) won't buy them because it looks like a McDonalds and that's bad for their brands. So now they're all super generic so that if they fail, any company will be more willing to buy the building."


28 June, 2025

Engineered Addictions

https://masonyarbrough.substack.com/p/engineered-addictions

The deeper issue is that we’ve outsourced our human connection to systems designed for profit. Real connection happens in the margins that can’t be monetized. The conversations that don’t generate data, the relationships that don’t scale, and the moments that can’t be optimized for engagement.

Perhaps the goal isn’t to build better social media. Perhaps it's to build systems that make social media less necessary. Improve third spaces where people connect directly, authentically, without intermediation by systems designed to extract value from their attention.

This isn't about being anti-tech. I'm a founder and engineer myself. It's about being pro-human. These platforms have genuinely connected people across continents, organized movements, and amplified voices that needed to be heard. The core ideas were beautiful and necessary.

But we took a catastrophic wrong turn when we optimized for engagement over connection, for time-on-platform over user wellbeing, for extraction over authentic relationship. Now we’re fighting a battle against the architecture of distraction, against companies that profit from fractured attention and frayed mental health.


08 June, 2025

Does Abundance Start at Home?

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/abundance-at-home

Kelsey Piper and Jasmine Sun talk about microschools, whether localism is the enemy of Abundance, and why Chinese bureaucrats are like Growth PMs.


07 June, 2025

Scientists of Reddit: What's a discovery that should have blown people's minds but somehow got a collective shrug from the world?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1jsjvl7/scientists_of_reddit_whats_a_discovery_that/

We basically “cured” most people of cystic fibrosis in the last five years. It is the most miraculous medical breakthrough I can think of, comparable only to insulin treatment for diabetics or the triple cocktail for HIV patients in the 90s. In the span of five years, thousands of cystic fibrosis patients saw their projected lifespans go up to normal. The treatments don’t work on every CF mutation, but they are incredible. The Atlantic published an article last year that made me sob.

05 June, 2025

'How A Cancer Diagnosis Inspired My Performance As Nurse Dana On 'The Pitt''

https://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/a64957153/katherine-lanasa-the-pitt-cancer-exclusive-essay/

I began treatment—surgery and about three weeks of daily radiation—in March 2023. Along with my why not me? mantra, I found comfort in the idea of framing everything as love. I saw those big machines as a sign of how fortunate I am—fortunate to have the means to seek care and treatment, and fortunate that somebody cared enough about people to create this device to shoot radiation into me and save my life.

I looked at it all as care and as love. When I set my mind on that intention, everything became evidence of love. Not feeling victimized by the treatment is tricky, but if you can get there, it's really, really helpful.

04 June, 2025

Saying Goodbye

https://chrisgiven.com/2025/06/saying-goodbye/

When the Treasury Department ordered the Direct File team to stop work and disband, the toughest part was saying goodbye.

Direct File deserves an Ocean’s Eleven-style montage for assembling the team. The old partner who had to be convinced to come back for one more job (the best, and perpetually most reluctant, user experience lead in the business). The loose cannon I was wary of bringing onto the team due to a checkered past (a brilliant engineer with a crypto startup on his resume). The whiz kid with the precise set of skills needed to pull off the plan (an interaction designer by training, she and I had studied up on tax law together, and she took to it like a fish to water).

We came together, a band of misfits and weirdos, under the banner of a fantastical, improbable mission. It felt like we were unstoppable. And then we were stopped.

And as much as we had accomplished, we knew we were just getting started. So we did our best to document what we had learned. We prepared the project for hibernation, writing notes for a future team that might never come. We said goodbye.

It was August 2022.

31 May, 2025

Cost of false positives (2011)

https://laughingmeme.org/2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/

Imagine you’ve got a near perfect model for detecting spammers on Twitter. Say, Joe’s perfectly reasonable model of “20+ tweets that matched ‘^@[\w]+ http://’”. Joe is (presumably hyperbolically) claiming 99% accuracy for his model. And for the moment we’ll imagine he is right. Even at 99% accuracy, that means this algorithm is going to be incorrectly flagging roughly 2 million tweets per day as spam that are actually perfectly legitimate.

If you’ve never run a social software site (which Joe of course has, but for the folks who haven’t) let me tell you: these kinds of false positives are expensive.

They’re really expensive. They burn your most precious resources when running a startup: good will, and time.

Briefly: Anonymous Questions

https://kellanem.com/notes/anonymous-questions

As leadership, Q+A serves several important functions.


Direct File on GitHub

https://chrisgiven.com/2025/05/direct-file-on-github/

The IRS has now published the vast majority of Direct File’s code on GitHub as open-source software. As a work of the U.S. government, Direct File is in the public domain. And now everyone can check it out.

Releasing Direct File’s source code demonstrates that the IRS is fulfilling its obligations under the SHARE IT Act (three weeks ahead of schedule!). Now that Direct File has paved the way, I hope that more of the IRS’s code, paid for with taxpayer dollars, will soon be available to all of us.