"Follow Your Passion" is terrible career advice. It assumes happiness is a fossil in your soul waiting to be dug up. "Love What You Do" is 10x better. It recognizes passion is built, not found, in the reality of your work.

There's a whole generation that learned irony before sincerity and now they're trapped. Can't be earnest without a layer of self-deprecation. Can't be enthusiastic without signaling awareness of how cringe enthusiasm is. The price of never being vulnerable is never connecting.

'Touch grass' is what extremely online people tell other extremely online people as if taking a 20 minute walk will cure the spiritual rot of spending 8 hours a day in the discourse mines

If I genuinely believed I was 18 months away from superintelligence that could solve cancer, I would probably not be pivoting to horny chatbots, but that's just me (a person with priorities)

"Turns out if you criticise private jets on LinkedIn you make a lot of dudes who don’t own private jets real mad. Which supports my theory that all men secretly believe they will one day own a private jet."

The most productive people I know don't use productivity systems...

Feeling scattered? Can’t focus? Everything feels urgent but nothing feels clear? I wrote (and tested) a 90-day protocol to reboot your mind. No gimmicks. Just discipline, attention, and real thinking. 🧵 1/10

Started a YouTube channel. No jump cuts. No background music. No dopamine slot-machine thumbnails. Just ideas I think are worth hearing, said clearly, once. If that sounds like something you’re craving, I’d love to have you there.

People are shocked to discover they need to fact-check ChatGPT and I'm having the uncomfortable realization that they never fact-checked their uncle's Facebook posts, their friend's medical advice, or literally anything Google's top result told them, and suddenly the last decade makes sense...

Prediction: future generations will judge our approach to mental healthcare similarly to how we view medieval approaches to physical illnesses. Making healthcare inaccessible for the organ most likely to malfunction seems obviously irrational in retrospect.

Every best seller now is called something like “Gone” and “Vanished” I miss when books had titles like “An Account of the Fortunes and Misfortunes of Miss Arabella Wren, A Young Lady of Considerable Charm and No Inheritance, Who Was Thrice Deceived, Twice Abducted, and Ultimately Vindicated, Through No Fault of Her Own, but by the Unlikely Grace of a Retired Corsair with a Limp”

There is no “good” social media platform. Every single one of them is terrible in its own uniquely horrifying way. 1 of 14

RSS never tracked you. Email never throttled you. Blogs never begged for dopamine. The old web wasn’t perfect. But it was yours.

Mastodon is the only platform where saying “this was compiled with Cargo nightly” is considered foreplay.

If you live in a community with 98% vaccination rates, you can afford to be the 2%. You can post wellness memes about "natural immunity" and still get herd immunity as a side effect. Your child is statistically safe, not because of your parenting, but in spite of it. https://www.theindex.media/the-herd-immunity-illusion/ https://www.theindex.media/the-herd-immunity-illusion/

I will never understand the fear of “overreacting” to Nazism. You’re worried about being too alert to genocidal ideology? That’s like worrying the fire alarm is being rude to the flames.

Cool won’t save you. Irony won’t protect you. Apathy won’t set you free. The world is burning, and the people mocking from the sidelines are dead weight. Give a shit. Stand for something. Be cringe. It’s the only way anything has ever changed.

Westenberg.

The Case for Embracing Cringe

We curate ourselves into something safe. We smooth out our rough edges. We keep things palatable, we stay detached, we’re less invested, we’re ...

I'm keen to move as much of my stack as I can away from US tech. Any European-based, GDPR compliant / privacy forward podcast apps out there? DuckDuckGo is proving remarkably unhelpful and just listing podcasts about privacy...

Never forget: misogyny is a skill issue

Who says a profile pic needs a smile? Not me. As a woman trying to build a writing career in the utter bullshit that is the tech world, putting on a friendly grin doesn’t feel right. It certainly doesn’t feel real. I’m not about coming off as unfriendly. Believe me, I've got a vibrant spirit and a wicked sense of humour. But too often, women feel squeezed into boxes - expected to soften our talent with feminine charm, pleasantness, and perpetual cheer.