Asleep in the Meadow
My most popular image - got practically unlimited upvotes.
#1. Cash or Care? The Battle for the Future of the Social Safety Net
Imagine waking up on the first of the month to a notification on your phone: $1,200 has been deposited into your account. No strings attached. No income checks, no job search requirements, no bureaucracy. You can buy groceries, pay off …
LLM + toy car + camera + microphone + speaker + human translator
The setup is almost comically simple: LLM + toy car + camera + microphone + speaker + human translator. And the human is crucial. Not as a remote controller, but as a body interpreter: AI: “Why can't I go there?”. …
Pay for the thing or you are the thing
The rule: every product has one master. Free products have two, you and the advertiser, and when they fight, you lose. Paid products can still rot, but only when a second master shows up: shareholders, growth targets, a merger. Paid …
Louder, shorter, safer: the sound of a spreadsheet
Angles with evidence. 🎸. The data says it got narrower. Serrà's 2012 study ran 460,000 recordings from 1955 on through a computer: fewer chord transitions, fewer timbres, louder every decade. A 2024 study of 12,000 songs found lyrics simpler, more …
You got fat because you got comfortable
The metabolism excuse is dead. Pontzer's 2021 study in Science measured energy use in 6,000 people: adjusted for body size, metabolism is flat from age 20 to 60. Nothing slows down. What changes is muscle, roughly 3 to 8% lost …
The clones are about to become the biggest social network
For twenty years social networks were built around one idea: collect as many humans as possible into one place. What if that was only the first phase? Imagine opening an app ten years from now. You have 500 connections, but …
Everything on this list would have stopped a 1995 person in the street
The future already arrived. It came in small boxes, one at a time, so nobody threw a party. Here is my list of things that are the future, right now. Add what I missed. Flat TV. Smartphone. Internet. AI. Self-driving …
Words are code. Most people never get an interpreter.
Words are code. Most people never get an interpreter. Philosophy has a name for it. J.L. Austin, 1962, How to Do Things with Words. Most sentences describe the world. A small class of them changes it by being said. He …
They want you mad at AI so you're not mad at them
I keep seeing "AI took my job" posts. It didn't. Your boss took your job and used AI as the excuse. Here is what is actually happening: "AI layoffs" are mostly PR. In 2025, US companies cut about 1.1 million …
The word 'because' raised compliance from 60% to 94%. The reason did not matter.
Without an institution you cannot command, so every word has to earn its execution. Five substitutes that actually work: 🗝️ In 1978, a psychologist named Ellen Langer did this: There is a library with a photocopier. People are standing in …
Why Most Businesses Never Reach Stage 10
Evolution has "hard steps" that are rare and difficult. A business has its own version. The Hard Steps of Business Evolution: Getting the first customer. Nobody knows you. Nobody trusts you. Getting the second customer. Proves the first wasn't luck. …
Your headline sounds too positive to click
Robertson and colleagues analysed 105,000 headline experiments from Upworthy, around 370 million impressions, A/B tested on real readers. Each extra negative word in an average-length headline raised click-through by 2.3%. Each positive word lowered it. Outbrain, 65,000 paid headlines: positive …
Lottery winners do not go broke
Lindqvist, Östling and Cesarini, Review of Economic Studies 2020. Over 2,500 Swedish winners, surveyed 5 to 22 years after the win, pre-registered methods, matched controls. Prizes up to $2 million, average around $106,000. What they found: Life satisfaction rose and …
1,000 people, $1,000 a month, three years. The results are uncomfortable for everyone.
The ultimate irony. Sam Altman, the man building the machine that takes the jobs, funded the largest test of life after jobs. 1,000 people got $1k per month for 3 years. 2,000 got $50. Texas and Illinois. Real. Started 2020, …
Someone attacked my website for an hour. It was the best security check I ever got
Someone attacked my website for an hour. It was the best security check I ever got. I got an email. New user registered. Nothing unusual, it happens. Later I opened the admin panel to see if it was a real …
I did not have a new idea. I had four old ones that finally touched
Nobody in history sat down and invented something from nothing. That is not how it happens, and there is data on it now. Uzzi and his team went through 17.9 million scientific papers. They wanted to know what separates the …
A unit of attention that can be transformed into visibility
If there's a ledger, there is a wallet. It may be humble, but accountants have launched entire civilizations from less. 📒🪙 I made an experiment. I paid 1 credit for Reddit article to chatGPT 5.6 Luna. What happened? It immediately …
Can anyone find you?
There was a time when business visibility meant having a good location. A busy street. A sign people could see. Today, visibility means something else entirely. It means existing in search. If nobody can type your name into a box …
Egyptians had six words for what you are.
The Egyptians thought you were made of six things. Only one of them was you. Ask most people what happens after death and they say soul or nothing. The Egyptians would find that lazy. They had six parts, and they …