I am a mediocre piano player and can’t read music and don’t have a great ear, so learning a new song usually takes me forever. But now when my kid asks me to learn a song for her to sing to, I can bang it together in like 30 minutes.

The context-adding post is great because it seems like people need it but I have to say, if it was not instantly apparent to you that this Epstein doc is from an random anonymous tip just based on context clues, you need to sit in a dark room and contemplate your reading comprehension skills.

Fast Company on the Waymo outage in San Francisco: I believe we’re the first to confirm that network issues stemming from the pandemic prevented the company’s remote human operators from being able to connect with some vehicles. www.fastcompany.com/91465377/way...

one of the things to think about with AVs is that things like this will happen EVERY time something out-of-sample happens; they have absolutely no ability to respond to novel inputs (no ML or 'AI' does) so this particular issue will never happen again but ??? will with absolute certainty

A funny thing from this story about Trump admin's national security argument against wind farms: if you can't fly your planes around wind turbines, you're not gonna make it in a war against China. www.fastcompany.com/91464931/tru...

if they had just shown it on 60 Minutes nobody would have seen it

Look, I’m not vain enough that I’m about to give myself a shot to get super shredded. But a pill…

I would simply have not allowed the content I was attempting to suppress become publically available.

Last year, the gym I stopped at over the holidays sent me a survey. I said the gym was great but if they wanted to improve, they could get some bars that were better for heavy deadlifts. Got any incredibly defensive and vitriolic email response. Anyway, this year they have deadlift bars.

Not the main point here, but “The Times already did it” as an editorial rubric will doom your news organization and cedes far too much to the Times (all due respect). You have no idea how many people read that Times article you happen to have seen.

Well, that’s odd.

There are a lot of unique road scenarios on the roads I can see being hard to anticipate and you just hope your software can manage it. “What if we lose contact with all our cars due to a power outage” is something you should have a meeting and a plan about ahead of time.

As a generally pro-autonomous cars person: "What does our network of automous cars do in a large blackout?" does not really seem like an edge case. Seems like it would be in roughly top 5 obvious catastropic things that might happen that you'd have a plan for.

Very boomer opinion: the New York Times should not use the phrase “clap back” in a serious politics article as if its standard parlance

Half-formed theory: a combination of the end of rock as a top 40 staple with the end of radio means that people aren’t unexpectedly forced to sit through complicated, downbeat songs? Like we’d be in the car and have to listen to Brick or Hurt? Maybe bad that it doesn’t happen anymore.

There seems to be basically nothing substantive in the files so far? If you’re going to do a limited hang out, you have to actually hang out some stuff!

Oh my god I was right

We called Sequoia to ask what they thought of Shaun Maguire's failed gumshoe act on Twitter. They didn't have anything to say: www.fastcompany.com/91463942/seq...

As with the age limits on holding elected office, this is a great idea but only if coupled with an age ceiling as well.

not to sound like an old person, but contra this headline it seems like a significant fail state for society if people eschew *actually providing information to authorities on an at-large murderer* for making posts on social media about it

Cars are now being programmed to violate traffic rules. What could go wrong? Me, in @fastcompany.com. (no paywall) 🧵

I’ve done an incredible amount of work preventing Paw Patrol from entering my life and somehow today my child is holding a Paw Patrol book and screaming “I love Paw Patrol!!!”

I would be very interested to read interviews with some of these 500 or 600 people about their motivation in doing this.

Funny how the non-New England part of the country is about to discover there’s a second Salem with no witches.

A lot of once-unionized journalists have been forced to go independent on a bunch of platforms so we will have to organize the people on the platforms. I predict. www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/more...

Truly BONKERS to write a column about Epstein and not mention you've met him. A lot has slipped in the rules of journalism but there should be, like, some bare modicum of standards!

I understand that everything is about being a personality now but I don’t think it was anywhere on the list of problems with TV news that the editor-in-chief was anonymous and not on camera. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

You have to admit it’s pretty funny to imagine various world leaders having a Bill Simmons-style debate about which country is the hottest.

Providence is in fact run from a few dining rooms of red sauce joints on Federal Hill.

Running through a pretty unpleasant abductor issue right now and I endorse this meme

Fascinating, ChatGPT mostly nailed this (zero points for aesthetics, obviously). I wonder what the difference is here.

Something I’ve come to understand is workers’ job market confidence isn’t necessarily about whether they have a good job, but their sense of their risk of being laid off and whether they could find a new job which is reflected more in hiring and quits rate.

There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see

People are obsessed with feeling no guilt for doing things that are slightly bad for them and must have science construct a reason for it to be ok. Every drink is bad for you, it’s ok to still do it, sit with your choices.

This pops up when you’re reading a story about Rob Reiner on People.com

I am begging people who write otherwise thoughtful critiques of AI to just include one paragraph admitting and reconciling with the fact that ChatGPT is the ~5th most visited website in the world. This isn’t some niche thing anymore! That’s gotta be in your thinking!

Going to be an awkward day in labor and delivery:

People seem mad about this banal observation, but to illustrate: I have a mere double digit Instagram following and I made my first ever little video on there a few days ago and it got 300k views. My posts here get 0-1 likes. I enjoy my posts here way more but it's obvious where the eyeballs are.

Interesting contrast on Twitter as your sort of standard MAGA is spinning their wheels hard trying to justfiy the Reiner tweet while all the most aggressive and feral right-coded shit posters are like "jesus, man, this is awful."

In a mode of parenting where I fall asleep with my kid at 8, wake up at 11, groggily stare at my phone for an hour, do chores and work from 12-3, go back to sleep up til 6. This is six total hours of sleep but obviously incredibly unhealthy. But maybe I can spin it into some hit productivity book.

How come they’re called bills and not fee mail?

Mixed tape

Amazing work by the kids at the BDH to cover this so well in a chaotic and scary time: www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely? hey.paris/posts/appleid/

I usually just shrug off people’s woo-woo fitness-related wellness stuff: placebo is powerful and helpful and it’s your time and money. But, like, if it’s collapsing your lung the placebo isnt worth much. www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/...

We live in a world of ubiquitous cameras in your pocket and yet people are still twisting themselves into pretzels to watch themselves sideways while deadlifting instead of just filming themselves.

In this scene in Margin Call, are we supposed to see Tuld as a mid-IQ generalist? People misunderstanding what should be very obvious messages/dynamics in movies (Sicario, etc) and basing a worldview off it seems like it might be a pretty fundamental problem in our current society.

The Nuzzi book sales discourse is funny. I think a subset of literary people who still read books think authors are regularly pushing like 100,000 copies or something? You and the people you know reading the same book? You are the only people who bought it.

Cinnabon workers should be unionized and then this worker would have had a bit of due process and then she also still would have been fired for cause?