max k

There’s like maybe a maximum of 8 jobs where I understand what the job is. Shopkeeper. Farmer. Teacher of some kind. Priest. Novelist. Journalist. Private detective. Chef. That’s it. What is a data engineer. I don’t know.

I live right next to the US embassy in London. They built an actual moat around it. Who builds a moat around their embassy? Countries that do bad things and expect retaliation. Or countries who do diplomacy as if we’re in the Middle Ages.

Can you spot what's wrong with this desk rotation?

My new passport just arrived, probably my last. But it’s blue, not as solid as my first blue passport, but we live in changing times. Was the colour change worth all the trouble ? Don’t ask. We must look to the forward and battle on

Kind of underrated element of how things are now is that all these science magazines that used to appeal to a general audience out of just being *interesting* now seem to force themselves to be *useful*. Much non-fiction writing bends this way too — it has to be pragmatic.

A super interesting new study from Harvard Business Review. A 8-month field study at a US tech company with about 200 employees found that AI use did not shrink work, it intensified it, and made employees busier. Task expansion happened because AI filled in gaps in knowledge, so people started doing work that used to belong to other roles or would have been outsourced or deferred. That shift created extra coordination and review work for specialists, including fixing AI-assisted drafts and coaching colleagues whose work was only partly correct or complete. Boundaries blurred because starting became as easy as writing a prompt, so work slipped into lunch, meetings, and the minutes right before stepping away. Multitasking rose because people ran multiple AI threads at once and kept checking outputs, which increased attention switching and mental load. Over time, this faster rhythm raised expectations for speed through what became visible and normal, even without explicit pressure from managers.

This. Marx’s Labor Theory of Value is a hot mess. I don’t think it’s even an economic theory technically speaking. It’s an overstated moral critique that was only superficially plausible at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

This isn't something I like to talk about in public — the point of concealed carry is not to draw attention — but like many Americans, I carry everyday. The purpose of the second Amendment is the prevention of tyranny. What happened today was tyrannical, so I wrote about it. 🧵