The Ken Burns Effect

https://mattlira.substack.com/p/the-ken-burns-effect

Millions of Americans now inhabit information ecosystems that barely overlap. Most public figures avoid crossing these boundaries; some out of fear of unfriendly audiences, others because they worry that stepping outside their own silo will provoke a backlash from their closest allies. Burns’ latest tour defies that trend, as one of our nation’s great storytellers has moved effortlessly from The Today Show to Theo Von’s podcast, from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to Joe Rogan’s studio. What stands out is not merely the breadth of platforms he visits, striking as that is, but the authenticity with which he delivers his message. Burns shares the American story with a consistent sense of moral seriousness and intellectual credibility without condescension or pandering, addressing the best versions of his hosts and their audiences.

Mercy Otis Warren: "Look Over the Theatre of Human Action"

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/mercy-otis-warren-look-over-theatre-human-action

The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of man, that pants for distinction. This principle operates in every bosom, and when kept under the control of reason, and the influence of humanity, it produces the most benevolent effects. But when the checks of conscious are thrown aside, or the moral sense weakened by the sudden acquisition of wealth or power, humanity is obscured

How to be more agentic

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/how-to-be-more-agentic

Learn to love the moat of low status

The moat of low status is one of my favorite concepts, courtesy of my husband Sasha. The idea is that making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because it gives anyone who can cross it a real advantage. It’s possible to cross the moat quietly, by not asking questions and not collaborating, but those tradeoffs really nerf learning. “Learn by doing” is standard advice, but you can’t do that unless you splash around in the moat for a bit.

Maybe you’re not Actually Trying

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/maybe-youre-not-actually-trying

People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.

Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck at an earlier stage of development in at least one area. There is one theater of life where they’re not Actually Trying — where they’re approaching serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, though they are now capable adults.

In my particular corner of the world, there are tons of high-achievers in work. These are ingenious people shaping the world through innovations in science, technology, and policy. But many of them haven’t applied the same ingenuity to their interior experience or relationships. These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps.

It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.

Your enemies might be right about you

https://sahar.substack.com/p/your-enemies-might-be-right-about

If your enemies are attacking you and winning, there’s a good chance it’s because you have a real weakness.

It’s not that they’ll be nice enough to attack your weakness with compassion: they’ll twist truth and be as unscrupulous as they can get away with. It’s not that they’ll only attack you for things you’re actually wrong about: maybe you are weak because you’re correct but unpopular. But it still is a real weakness. Either way — you have a problem.

Even if it’s all horribly unfair — understanding where people don’t trust you, where they don’t like you, where you’re misunderstood, where people are liable to scandalous lies about you — that’s information. Useful information.

When we’re fully enmeshed in a social scene, we keep track of who is important, and who is an annoying barely tolerated crank. We forget that others looking in have neither the context nor desire to make that distinction. The worst members of your team often become its public face: the edgelords, the conspiracists, the assholes, the scolds, the predators, and worse. You know who will make sure to show you when that happens? Even when it hurts your feelings — especially if it hurts your feelings? Enemies. God bless them. 

The Deadliness of Good Intentions

https://www.1517.org/articles/the-deadliness-of-good-intentions

Therapists spend hours, if not years, trying to explain to people that intent does not equal impact. For example, you may not have intended to hurt your kids, but the fact of the matter is, you hurt your kids. You can’t tell your kids “stop acting hurt because I intended to do good—it just went wrong.” Therapists try to bring patients from the reality of “it went wrong” to “it needs to be made right.”

We try to justify ourselves through the means of the ever-virtuous “intent.” Intent is the mind’s way of searching for some redemption, or some justification. Intent is often a liar. It covers the sins of pride and entitlement. 

When we take a harder look at intent, we’ll find the “lesser sins” that we find tolerable, if not necessary sometimes to get the desired outcome that we’d prefer. For example, we had to lie, because otherwise they wouldn’t do what we needed them to do for a good thing to happen. Or, we were only making a prayer request, not gossiping. Any time we bend the law to fit our need for a “good thing,” we are attempting to do, we’ll find calculated manipulation, or the thoughtful way we hide what our actions so as to not upset anyone.

I Watched Stand-Up in Saudi Arabia

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/fear-laughing-riyadh-comedy-louis-ck/684527/?gift=SKtFP-7gCBnFn1bNJdqPMi_7j1-Q3xFUfh3oXFEbWpw

As I ate dinner one night at the Ritz-Carlton, in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the indoor swimming pool, I reflected that the promise of a five-star hotel is insulation, a cocoon against the outside world. A rich person—a successful comedian, say—could glide from the business-class lounge to the front of the aircraft to an air-conditioned limo to a luxury hotel where your dinner is interrupted by five different people asking if everything is okay. Live enough days like this, and the whole world becomes your bellhop. No wonder these guys like Saudi Arabia. The way that daily life bends around rich people is that little bit more obvious here.

The Agentic State Vision Paper

https://agenticstate.org/paper.html

AI technologies have matured sufficiently to handle real-world government complexity whilst costs have decreased enough to enable widespread deployment. Citizens increasingly expect digital service experiences comparable to those they receive from leading private sector organisations, creating public demand for agentic government services. Perhaps most importantly, governments that act now can actively shape the development trajectory of agentic AI to serve public purposes rather than merely adapting to systems designed by others according to commercial priorities.

Seven Charts That Explain the Past 25 Years of the NBA

https://www.theringer.com/2025/10/10/nba/seven-charts-that-explain-the-21st-century-nba

It’s hard to overstate just how much pro basketball has mutated since Y2K. The 2000s NBA was an analog league full of hulking centers, midrange jumpers, and pixelated national TV games framed in 4:3. But the game has since changed in every imaginable way: stylistically, financially, globally, and culturally. We’ve witnessed the rise of the 3-pointer, the death of the post-up, the internationalization of the MVP race, and the billionaire-ification of the NBA’s ownership class and even of some players. 

As part of its weeklong reflection on the NBA quarter century, The Ringer asked me to come up with a set of charts that explain the past 25 years of the best basketball league in the world. Let’s start with shooting.

Algorithms are breaking how we think

US gov't admits F-35 is a failure

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/f-35-failure/

Nearly a quarter century after the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to develop the Joint Strike Fighter Program into the F-35, the government finally admitted the jet will never live up to Lockheed’s ambitious promises — used to sell the $2 trillion boondoggle to nearly 20 countries around the world.

The Government Accountability Office released a report last month detailing the ongoing challenges the program faces. The first paragraph of the highlights page includes this sentence:

“The program plans to reduce the scope of Block 4 to deliver capabilities to the warfighter at a more predictable pace than in the past.”

The casual reader will be forgiven for possibly glossing over the passage because of its anodyne wording. But the statement is a profound admission that the F-35 will never meet the capability goals set for the program. “Reduce the scope of Block 4” means that program officials are forgoing planned combat capabilities for the jets.

Block 4 is the term to describe ongoing design work for the program. It began in 2019 and was termed as the program’s “modernization” phase. In reality, Block 4 is just a continuation of the program’s initial development process. Officials were unable to complete the F-35’s basic design within the program’s initial budget and schedule. Rather than making that embarrassing admission and requesting more time and money from Congress, Pentagon officials claimed the initial development process was complete (it was not) and they were moving on to “modernization.” What they really did was simply reclassify initial development work with a fancy rebrand.

So, when program officials say they plan to “reduce the scope of Block 4,” they are saying the F-35 will not have all the combat capabilities that were supposed to be a part of the original design.

This is a remarkable development

The dawn of the post-literate society

https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

Walter Ong emphasised that writing cools and rationalises thought. If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. You can play emotive music or show harrowing images. Such appeals are not rational but human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Without the array of logic-defeating appeals available to podcasters and YouTubers, authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now). Books are far from perfect but they are much more closely bound to the imperatives of logical argument than any other means of human communication ever devised.

Power, Money, and Booze - A Leaders Perspective on Preventing Sexual Assault

https://mkloepper2025.substack.com/p/power-money-and-booze-a-leaders-perspective

As you can imagine, the regional AAFES manager was not super happy about our request that he reduce shelf space dedicated to hard alcohol. Afterall, AAFES operates for profit. It’s a unique organization that provides service members with good retail services and circulates a portion of their proceeds into various morale programs. And, they operate for profit. And, booze makes money (as does tobacco and junk food). 

 In any event, despite his misgivings, when presented with our data, our regional AAFES manager had little choice…he reduced the linear shelf space of hard alcohol and limited container sizes to .75 liters. (Math is interesting…in one meeting the manager revealed his quarterly profits from hard alcohol. It was a lot. We did some quick napkin math and showed him the profit value to AAFES for each sexual assault in my Brigade. It was sickening, and inarguable).

I Printed a Microchip That Runs on Air — A Nervous System for Squishy Robots!

Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-economy-middle-class-rich.html

For most of the park’s history, Disney was priced to welcome people across the income spectrum, embracing the motto “Everyone is a V.I.P.” In doing so, it created a shared American culture by providing the same experience to every guest. The family that pulled up in a new Cadillac stood in the same lines, ate the same food and rode the same rides as the family that arrived in a used Chevy. Back then, America’s large and thriving middle class was the focus of most companies’ efforts and firmly in the driver’s seat.

That middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing power — and the wealth of our top earners has so exploded — that America’s most important market today is its affluent. As more companies tailor their offerings to the top, the experiences we once shared are increasingly differentiated by how much we have.

Data is part of what’s driving this shift. The rise of the internet, the algorithm, the smartphone and now artificial intelligence are giving corporations the tools to target the fast-growing masses of high-net-worth Americans with increasing ease. As a management consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of companies making this very transition. Many of our biggest private institutions are now focused on selling the privileged a markedly better experience, leaving everyone else to either give up — or fight to keep up.

Slow social media

https://herman.bearblog.dev/slow-social-media/

However, the underlying concept of social media is something I resonate with: Stay connected with the people you care about.

It's just that the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving relationships and fostering connection, they're advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged, lonely, and unhappy. And once TikTok figured out that short-form video with a recommendation engine is digital crack, all other social media platforms quickly sprang into action to copy their secret sauce.

Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.

I don't think most people using these platforms understand that they are the product. Instagram isn't built for you. It's built for marketers. It's built for celebrities to capitalise on their audiences. It's built for politicians and their cronies to sway sentiment. It's built to be as addictive as possible, and to capitalise on your insecurity and uncomfortability. 

DC Track Maps

https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/docs/DC_TrackMap.pdf?_t=1716910953

https://ggwash.org/images/posts/201309-091115.gif

Wheel of Emotions

https://mentallyagile.com/blog/2020/3/24/wheel-of-emotions

There are many emotion wheels out there, but they all center around six primary emotions:

• Fear

• Anger

• Sadness

• Love

• Joy

• Surprise

One might feel love, and that is a permissible answer, but one could also feel something more specific in that emotion. A conversation with a trusted friend might have someone feeling compassionate or peaceful. The point was to zero in on how we were feeling and give a true answer

Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-economy-middle-class-rich.html

For most of the park’s history, Disney was priced to welcome people across the income spectrum, embracing the motto “Everyone is a V.I.P.” In doing so, it created a shared American culture by providing the same experience to every guest. The family that pulled up in a new Cadillac stood in the same lines, ate the same food and rode the same rides as the family that arrived in a used Chevy. Back then, America’s large and thriving middle class was the focus of most companies’ efforts and firmly in the driver’s seat.

That middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing power — and the wealth of our top earners has so exploded — that America’s most important market today is its affluent. As more companies tailor their offerings to the top, the experiences we once shared are increasingly differentiated by how much we have.

Data is part of what’s driving this shift. The rise of the internet, the algorithm, the smartphone and now artificial intelligence are giving corporations the tools to target the fast-growing masses of high-net-worth Americans with increasing ease. As a management consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of companies making this very transition. Many of our biggest private institutions are now focused on selling the privileged a markedly better experience, leaving everyone else to either give up — or fight to keep up.

Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/why-good-ideas-die-quietly-and-bad-ideas-go-viral

The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data. Vast triage structures evolved to determine who got to learn what, when: medieval guilds, say, or network news reports. These systems were supposed to function in everybody’s best interests. We were finite brutes of fragile competence, and none of us could confront the abyss of unmitigated complexity alone. Beyond a certain point, however, we couldn’t help but perceive these increasingly centralized arrangements as insulting, and even conspiratorial. We were grownups, and, as such, we could be trusted to handle an unadulterated marketplace of ideas. The logic of the internet was simple: first, fire all of the managers; then, sort things out for ourselves. In the time since, one of the few unambiguously good things to have emerged from this experiment is an entire genre of attempts to explain why it mostly hasn’t worked out.

Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-the-bay

There’s a strange creed within much of polite society that insists men don’t need to be reminded of their worth, because they are privileged. In fact, some insist that reminding men of their worth might even make the privilege disparity worse.

This mentality is madness. There’s a raging epidemic of men who question their worth, and it’s leading to them spiraling into lostness and taking their own lives. It’s also causing an alarming uptick in men who despise women and polite society, believing that these people don’t believe they’re worth anything at all.

Men need to know that we care. They need to know that they’re worthy of respect, love, and kindness. The only way this can happen is if we loudly discuss the benefits and beauty that men bring to society.

No one should ever feel ashamed or unworthy because of an inherent trait. Boys should be just as proud of their gender as girls are, and we can accomplish this by celebrating the beauties of both identities.

Officer, suspect dead after shooting near Emory, CDC campus

https://www.decaturish.com/public_safety/active-shooter-reported-at-emory-campus-updates-details/article_1e631ec0-b30b-44f7-bc49-35901c2ef8ae.html

A DeKalb County Police officer died in the incident and the suspect also died. DeKalb officials have identified the officer as David Rose. CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson said Rose, 33, had wife and two children. They were expecting a third child, she said.

“Today is a very dark day in DeKalb County,” Cochran-Johnson said.

Rose started with DeKalb County Police in September 2024 and worked at the North Central Precinct in Tucker.

“He was committed to serving the community,” Interim Police Chief Greg Padrick said. “At this time we’re asking for the community’s prayers for his family, his friends, his loved ones and the entire DeKalb County Police Department family.”

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

https://www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-the-future-all-food-will-be-cooked-in-a-microwave-and-if-you-cant-deal-with-that-then-you-need-to-get-out-of-the-kitchen/

As a restaurant owner – I’m astounded at the rate of progress since microwaves were released a few short years ago. Today’s microwave can cook a frozen burrito. Tomorrow’s microwave will be able to cook an entire Thanksgiving Dinner. Ten years from now a microwave may even be able to run the country.

Recently I was watching a livestream of a local microwave salesman. He suggested that restaurants should cook all their food in a microwave.

We all need to transition to this way of cooking, because clearly this is where the future is going. I expect in a few short years kitchens will be much smaller. Gone will be stoves and ovens and flat tops. Restaurant kitchens will only be a small closet with a microwave. I predict this will happen by 1955 at the latest.

Many chefs I know get upset at me when I tell them this. But this is the truth: If you can’t cook everything you make in a microwave thats a skill issue. You need to learn now because when everything is cooked in a microwave you’ll be out of a job. When microwaves are everywhere you’ll be so far behind you’ll never learn how to use a microwave. Chefs who use tools besides microwaves are luddites. They live in fear of the future.

Obituary for Elsie Pfluger Doerpinghaus

https://www.newspapers.com/article/austin-american-statesman-obituary-for-e/126453922/

Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/opinion/antisemitism-american-jews-israel-mamdani.html

“What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians,” Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister, wrote in Haaretz. “We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

What many young Jews see is what Olmert sees, and they want no part of it. Are they to defend war crimes? Are they to defend or even accept the use of mass starvation as a tool of war? Are they to believe in equality everywhere but in the state that is meant to be their spiritual home? There are many who bristled at the term “genocide” a year ago but have come to accept it now.

What other Jews see is a world that cares little for Jewish life and has always sought Israel’s destruction. “We’re talking about a country that exists,” Lipstadt said. “So when you say, ‘I’m an anti-Zionist,’ what is Zionism? It’s the right of Jews to have a national homeland. And if you’re saying, ‘I don’t believe in that,’ then on a very practical level, what happens to the six-plus million Jews who live in that country?”

After our conversation, Lipstadt emailed me to underscore a point. “Here’s what I would say to those young people or whomever who question the right of Israel to exist. They may not be — they probably are not — antisemitic in intent, but placing the lives of half of the world Jewish population in danger is absolutely antisemitic in impact.”

Enough Is Enough. Israel Is Committing War Crimes by Ehud Olmert

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-05-27/ty-article-opinion/.premium/enough-is-enough-israel-is-committing-war-crimes/00000197-0dd6-df85-a197-0ff64a5c0000

The government of Israel is currently waging a war without purpose, without goals or clear planning and with no chances of success. Never since its establishment has the State of Israel waged such a war. The criminal gang headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has set a precedent without equal in Israel's history

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."

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. 

How AI microsites reshape persuasion, urgency, and memory.

https://www.scrollthefuture.ai/

These AI microsites are not just web design trends. They are a new rhetorical genre: part research briefing, part activist playbook, part intellectual performance. They occupy an uneasy space between the slow caution of peer-reviewed science and the raw urgency of political campaigning. And because they are so visually polished, so editorially deliberate, they quietly shape what readers believe to be reasonable, probable, and inevitable.

In this essay, I want to trace the rise of the AI microsite. I will map its form and aesthetic. I will place it inside the wider patchwork of AI safety thinking where hard fact bleeds into forecasting, normative argument, and speculation. I will suggest that the microsite is not just how AI futures are explained: it is how AI futures are made plausible.

Finally, I will ask what it means for policy, for public discourse, and for memory itself when our most serious arguments are published not in journals or newspapers, but in artifacts as ephemeral, persuasive, and architected as these.

The Paperwork Reduction Act Created a Paperwork Explosion

https://reason.com/2025/04/16/the-paperwork-reduction-act-created-a-paperwork-explosion/

You might think that sharing stories about the positive, burden-reducing effects of user research would result in OIRA encouraging the practice. You might also think that demonstrating what's possible if burden reduction is really your goal—holistically considering and aligning all information collections, using wizards, thoughtfully reusing known information, ensuring systemwide address updates, and even better accounting for people's real names—would change how the PRA is implemented.

But it hasn't. A quiet attempt was made in 2014 to exempt "direct observation" from PRA authority, which changed no one's behavior. Ten years later, OIRA issued a memo, insisting it had been a fan of user research all along. But this memo is meaningless progress; you can see that agencies are still submitting user research plans for OIRA approval as of April 2025. This marks over a decade of internal battles for only one of the many improvements the PRA implementation desperately needs, with virtually no progress—and a great deal of harm—to show for it.

Changes from the inside didn't work. Chipping away at the margin didn't work. The PRA has to go.

Ultimately, Congress should repeal the PRA entirely. In the meantime, the current legislation includes pilot and delegated authority that would allow the OIRA administrator to declare that as long as agencies self-attest to testing their information collections with their end users, and streamlining information collection when possible—both of which the PRA's current implementation makes virtually impossible—then they are exempt from OIRA review.

There is tremendous danger right now that half the country views any activity in the current administration as something to fight against. This should not be one of them. The only proponent of the PRA is inertia.

On the faults of very online masculinity

https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1jzrtz7/both_sides_of_the_political_aisle/

The Town That Went Crazy for Crypto

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/business/rainbowex-crypto-ponzi-scheme.html

In San Pedro, Argentina, 16,000 people, a fifth of the population, signed up for a cryptocurrency exchange where everyone won. Until they didn’t.[...]

RainbowEx is a version of a scam that has popped up around the world, he said in a recent interview, using a nearly identical software platform each time. He’s found iterations in Africa, Europe, Asia and North America, where examples have surfaced in Alabama and Washington State. At least 200 versions are currently active, Mr. Eldritch said in a phone interview. Each has a different name and many have La China-like characters dispensing crypto instructions. In a now-expired variant in Italy, the La China persona was called Dolly.

War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

https://www.clientserver.dev/p/war-story-the-hardest-bug-i-ever#footnote-anchor-1-159719261

All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.

The Scammer’s Manual: How to Launder Money and Get Away With It

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/world/asia/cambodia-money-laundering-huione.html

Documents and insiders reveal how one of the world’s major money laundering networks operates.

How One Las Vegas ED Saved Hundreds of Lives After the Worst Mass Shooting in U.S. History

https://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-vegas-ed-saved-hundreds-lives-worst-mass-shooting-u-s-history/

The night that Stephen Paddock opened fire on thousands of people at a Las Vegas country music concert, nearby Sunrise Hospital received more than 200 penetrating gunshot wound victims. Dr. Kevin Menes was the attending in charge of the ED that night, and thanks to his experience supporting a local SWAT team, he’d thought ahead about how he might mobilize his department in the event of a mass casualty incident.

Ninety-five theses on AI

https://www.secondbest.ca/p/ninety-five-theses-on-ai

VII. Technological transitions cause regime changes

• Even under best case scenarios, an intelligence explosion is likely to induce state collapse / regime change and other severe collective action problems that will be hard to adapt to in real time.

• Government bureaucracies are themselves highly exposed to disruption by AI, and will need “firmware-level” reforms to adapt and keep-up, i.e. reforms to civil service, procurement, administrative procedure, and agency structure.

• Congress will need to have a degree of legislative productivity not seen since FDR.

• Inhibiting the diffusion of AI in the public sector through additional layers of process and oversight (such as through Biden’s OMB directive) tangibly raises the risk of systemic government failure.

• The rapid diffusion of AI agents with approximately human-level reasoning and planning abilities is likely sufficient to destabilize most existing U.S. institutions.

• The reference class of prior technological transitions (agricultural revolution, printing press, industrialization) all feature regime changes to varying degrees.

• Seemingly minor technological developments can affect large scale social dynamics in equilibrium (see: Social media and the Arab Spring or the Stirrup Thesis).