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Life is a series of random walks. Even if you walk the same path every day (in the literal sense), your individual steps on every walk you take are essentially random, and for the most part you aren’t even conscious of them because this is handled by muscle memory. When I say the steps are random, what I mean is that if you could precisely measure every step you take, where your foot lands, how much force you apply with your individual muscles to all the components of your leg and foot and torso and so on, the data would appear to match a pattern from a statistically perspective, but each individual step would have a normal random distribution.

Okay okay, I realize this is a click-baity subject, but I couldn’t help myself. I see a lot of confusion on the internet and elsewhere about VR, the “metaverse”, Facebook’s pivot, and the cringeworthy marketing content (which you can skip unless you love buzzwords and egregious use of terms like “collaboration” and “AI”). The whole thing is oddly reminiscent of an episode of Star Trek.

I remember when my first serious girlfriend broke up with me, which was decades ago. Her chief complaint at the time had to do with some recent event, the nature of which I do not recall, but I do remember our conversation about it. In particular, I pleaded with her and explained how she was clouded by recency bias, and focusing on the recent negative experience while forgetting all the good experiences.

We’re told early on in life that memorization is the path to success. Education systems seem to be largely based on this idea. Most school lessons involve some degree of memorization, and creativity is generally discouraged in core curriculums. I’m pretty sure this is a bad idea, because there’s not really that much benefit to memorization. Instead, I think critical thinking and the ability to quickly find information is much more valuable.

I’ve made my share of bad predictions. I’ve had lots of good predictions too. And being right often doesn’t matter, because in the end almost nobody will care if you were right or wrong, and if you’re going to go about placing bets based on your predictions, it’s incredibly difficult to get the timing right.

Once upon a time, the US government enforced antitrust legislation. One of the most famous examples of this is the case of Standard Oil. To understand what happened to Standard Oil, we need to take a short walk back in time through history. The year is 1890, and the US Congress is a well-functioning body with rational officials who’s brains still function at a high enough level to pass sensible legislation.

I had the recent pleasure of speaking with someone from a big tech company about their interview process. They wanted to put me through the funnel to run the gauntlet and see if I “had what it takes” to make it to the offer stage. I declined, but (against better judgement) I gave them 30 minutes to pitch their company to me anyway.

Photo by Denys Nevozhai If you happen to know me personally, you are probably familiar with my opinions on cars, and likely tired of hearing about them. I belong to the group of people who frequent subs like r/fuckcars. My favourite YouTube channels are “Not Just Bikes” and “Climate Town”.

Humans are pretty bad at intuiting about exponential growth. Whether it’s pollution, population growth, or the way a virus spreads, our brains are bad at understanding the impact of such growth.

The word on the street is there’s a “labour shortage”. If we look at the data, however, it tells a different story. I’ve heard theories about people retiring, or too many COVID excess deaths, or people being flush with cash because the government gave everyone a coulpe thousand bucks (which is about one month’s rent), but looking at the data I’m not seeing numbers that reflect most of those theories.