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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

‘We Are the Most Rejected Generation’

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/opinion/rejection-college-youth.html

Not long ago, I was at Williams College, speaking with a fascinating and terrifically observant senior named David Wignall. We were talking about what it was like to be young these days, and he made a point that I’d never considered. “We are the most rejected generation,” he said.

He’s right. He pointed to the admission rates at elite universities. By 1959, about half of American college applicants applied to just one school. But now you meet students who feel that they have to apply to 20 or 30 colleges in the hopes that there will be one or two that won’t reject them. In the past two decades, the number of students applying to the 67 most selective colleges has tripled, to nearly two million a year, while the number of places at those schools hasn’t come close to keeping up. Roughly 54,000 students applied to be part of the Harvard class of 2028, and roughly 1,950 were accepted. That means that about 52,050 were rejected.

The same basic picture applies to the summer internship race. Goldman Sachs, for example, has 2,700 internship positions and receives roughly 315,000 applicants, which means that about 312,300 get rejected. I recently spoke with one college student who applied to 40 summer internships and was rejected by 39. I ran into some students who told me they felt they had to fill out 150 to 250 internship applications each year to be confident there would be a few that wouldn’t reject them.