I was one of the kids who grew up on por-... podcasts, and now I'm a lonely man. Coincidence? #selfhelp #masculinity #addiction open.substack.com/pub/kitnouss...

Chinese readers when I translate the meaning of my Christian name into Chinese characters: "hmm, a bit macho, a bit too 'red'" Chinese readers when they see the characters for 'soup nanny': oh that's Tom Cruise! so handsome!

I wrote about blaming your parents for your woes and the days of wacky 19th C shrinks: open.substack.com/pub/kitnouss... #trauma

I don't know if any western apps do this, but on WeChat short vids there is a heart button (visible to your followers) and a like button (only visible to you). In the early days, we wanted everyone to see our likes. Now we want the option.

I like this Yiddish expression you say after something good so you don't jinx it. It's like when we were kids and we said we wanted to sit in the front seat: "called it, locked it, no black magic"

"noting that in the 1980s and 90s, computer adoption gave the world all kinds of tools that reshaped the labor market. But labor productivity grew just 2% to 3%." I'm shocked that the introduction of e-mail and spreadsheets only had a single-digit effect. edition.cnn.com/2025/05/30/b...

He also remarked on the logistical feat of designing a study protocol deemed acceptable by its feline participants. “I really commend this group of scientists for being successful in engaging 30 cats in doing this stuff,” “Most cats want nothing to do with your research.” They herded cats! NYT

I reviewed a self-help book called Tiny Experiments. Thanks for the inspiration @ashleyafrawley.bsky.social @oliverburkeman.com open.substack.com/pub/kitnouss...

Got this creepy ad from twitch to try and entice me back. It's a totally fabricated conversation where all my friends are wondering where I am during non-descript 'fire' moment. Twitch themselves should know from my real chat logs that I have no friends there.

Made a lil vid about Marx and the Factory game genre #gaming #addiction youtu.be/u9aSxfsL6SY

This much cool should be illegal

What asymptote are we approaching for verifications and captchas online? Eventually, I think we will spend 50% of our time posting and 50% of our time logging in.

Video games are weird. To be in the Steam top 100 is a huge accomplishment, and yet many of those games I've never played and never even heard of. It takes hundreds of thousands of players to make a game a hit, but you can write a best seller book on a few thousand sales.

Data are not any more objective than words, and data analysts need to stop dining out on the cred of pure mathematics open.substack.com/pub/kitnouss...

People getting murked by early railway accidents (and later getting quasi-hysterical 'railway spine' injuries) are where we get our modern definition of the 'accident' to begin with. There have always been misfortunes and calamities, but after trains we had a new kind that needed a language.

One problem with self-help and advice columns, and I'm only paraphrasing (I think) @oliverburkeman.com here, is that you have to use the wisdom you already have to discern between the stars in the galaxy of new media. Self-persuasion and rationalization have a lot of room to do the curating.

Oh, Lenovo has updated their privacy policy? You know what, I'm going to opt out of this round. Let me just throw my laptop in the trash.

I wrote about the NYT op-ed that informatively begs the bosses not to replace all their entry-level jobs with AI: kitnoussis.substack.com/p/ceos-can-b...

similarly, in the US there are *far* more people working in museums than in coal mining. there are some industries that have salience as 'working people' and 'hearts of the community' (often after decades of intentional managed decline) and some that do not.

How come Reddit can't keep bots of their platform, but me, a real person, can't even post or comment because my 'karma' is not good enough, and my secret trust score is too low because I use a VPN? We need better captchas. I'm thinking piss sensors like they had in Vietnam.

"...took Facebook nearly two years to overcome the staunch resistance by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally introducing the [like button]" Everything good about facebook is from employees, everything bad is Zuck's. From the AP book review of "Like"

Vox article about dry texting has some good anecdotes. Will be interested to see what novels the young zoomers write about IM culture. It's not categorically different than a meatspace mailbox, but it's still weird for your lover and your landlord to come through the same portal, with the same hat.

First off, bring back album covers. I never see them anymore. Secondly, when was the last time a band was one Big Guy and five Lil Guys?

A new evidence review asks what speed limits should be if we started with the goal of reducing death and injury. Safe to say that despite being rooted in evidence, there'll be a lot of motivated reasoning trying to make these conclusions go away downloads.roadsafetyfoundation.org/Determining_...

The work of @ianwalker.bsky.social inspired me to write up a little something about my bipedal rage in a quadwheel world: open.substack.com/pub/kitnouss...

Our ggplot2 [un]charted course is live! 🎉 Lesson 1, “Why R and ggplot2?”, is free to explore — short, thoughtful & a bit different. Get the early-supporter price! 👉 ggplot2-uncharted.com Follow along as new content drops and learn while running your code in the browser 👩‍💻

What YouTube thinks you're into when it has no cookies or history on you: come for the cocomelon, stay for the met gala

@ianwalker.bsky.social I was reading a study out of China correlating personality traits and pedestrian behavior. PMCID: PMC5708679 I was interested in the way they extended previous research on anti-social behavior of motorists to anti-social behavior in pedestrians.

Why ask a friend or a stranger for an answer to a question that can easily searched online? Because there is more to communication than just exchanging information. "Let me google that for you" is something you say to a profile pic, not a to a person you recognize as a fellow soul.

My mom says she saw this at a thrift store and DIDN't buy it?! It was the 80s, so there was naturally a classical pilar

A series on the witticisms I found in Eagleton's Literary Theory that had me chuckling to myself in the cafe: "'imaginative vision' we now reverently elevate above the merely 'prosaic' discourse of those who can find nothing more dramatic to write about than the Black Death or the Warsaw Ghetto"

>“yet another thing I’m supposed to remember to do for my own good.” We have too many of these already, and I try to inflict such advice on people as little as possible. >But in this case it’s unavoidable. It’s a high priority should. www.painscience.com/articles/mic...

The newest and most powerful A.I. technologies — so-called reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier.

Help, my mathematical grant was cancelled by the NSF! Does anyone know why my work was flagged as 'DEI'?! #TidyTuesday

So the terminated NSF grants were, in part, selected by using an Excel formula flagging the word 'diversity' in the abstracts. BIO-diversity grants were slated for cancellation. Can we expect the guardrails of LLMs to do any better than simple keywords when our leaders can't either? #TidyTuesday

Though I have misgivings, I cannot resist using ChatGPT to debug emotional challenges. The language of troubleshooting and technical efficiency is embedded in me. Now, both the terms and the techniques for healing the soul are digital. #therapy #LLM

Loved this pic from Adam Tooze' newsletter. Computers have always been framed in metaphors of the mind. Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

Thanks to everyone who contributed their #DataViz, celebrated others’ work, and shared encouragement — thank you all simply for dedicating your time, in whatever context, to help make the 5th edition of the #30DayChartChallenge such a success 👑

@djnavarro.net This album cover from 1975 happened to appear in my algorithms shortly after your abstract pieces. I thought that was a bit of synchronicity. Considering it's from a yacht rock band, I don't know if you'll be flattered 😅, but nevertheless:

Shakespeare's plays packed the Globe Theatre. I've been told that the refined allusions were for the upper crust on the upper decks and the lewd jokes were for the groundlings. Could it be that the poor people in the audience were actually better listeners than today's elites? Pic IA Richards

The operations of the mind can only be described metaphorically, through a physical happening. It sounds trite, but it needs repeating in a time when machines are so hastily likened to minds. From "The Philosophy of Rhetoric" by I.A. Richards

I took an oath to never share my account. It's called the terms & conditions, sweaty💅. I bet you don't even read the privacy policy.

1/ What if you are a spy who needs a way to behave randomly, but no one can know what you are doing? Trying to 'think of a random number (or letter)' is like trying not to think of a white elephant. It goes against nature. But the world is filled with noise sources. #30DayChartChallenge

Can we go back to the black and green terminals from the 80s? At this rate, we will all need three 4K monitors to browse the web. #UI #UX 1. Tabs 2. Address Bar 3. Cookies bar 4. Special Notice 5. Site Title Bar 6. Site Navigation 7. Site Subnavigation 8. Title of the paper I'm reading ‼️

What happens when you force a job interview into the format of yes/no questions, but make the candidate answer randomly? Such a study is referenced in 'Noise' by Kahneman et al.

Social activities really do seem to be declining, though some people I know want to imagine it isn't. Data from the US BLS. The only thing that went up is caring for pets. Compensating? #30DayChartChallenge Imagine I posted this on an appropriate day for the theme.

Terence Tao, one of the world's best mathematicians, has said that he occasionally uses Wikipedia to get an overview of a new niche in math. This is the rare anecdote from the routines of genius that actually makes me feel good about my own ways.🥲

ChatGPT just gave me the most elaborate hallucination I've seen. Can anyone top this? It said that Meta was working on a hush-hush project called METAPHORADISE in order to teach LLMs to generate better metaphors. There was a detailed description Moments later, the AI told me that it didn't exist.

Are you out of poverty if you make 2.16$ a day? There is great uncertainty in both the definition and the data. One thing is clear to me: 2.15 is way too low. aeon.co/essays/china... #30DayChartChallenge Day 26: Monochrome