How to Eat With Others ↳

Spending my childhood summers in Portugal, I spent a lot of time in cafés where people would argue about anything and everything. Finding the minor disagreement that would spark the argument was the goal of being at that café. Someone unfamiliar with that kind of environment would walk in and assume a fight was gonna break out. But this was just people communicating. This was people enjoying their evening by having spirited conversations with their friends. Which, counter-intuitively, ends up bringing people together. Because if I enjoy a lively discussion—and I do—the person willing to go toe-to-toe with me is going to be someone I end up treasuring as a friend. As long as everyone understands the rules of discussion. We are arguing about minor things. We’re making argumentative mountains out of molehills. This isn’t conflict, it’s sport.

Why Steve Kerr Stayed With the Warriors ↳

He went to every doctor imaginable, a search for relief that would continue for a decade, flying up to Mayo, or down to Duke, or even to England for stem-cell therapy not approved in the United States. Nothing worked. In January of 2016 he returned to the team, leading the Warriors to an NBA-record 73 regular-season wins and taking them back to the finals, where they lost to the Cavaliers after being up three games to one. He made his health mostly off-limits in interviews.

One day his phone buzzed. It was Tiger Woods, who'd gotten his number from a mutual friend. Woods knew a lot about chronic pain.

"Did he have advice that worked?" I asked.

"No," Kerr said, "but we commiserated!"

My kids are obsessed with Pokemon, it’s great! 150 only though. ↳

What Not Having Mental Imagery Implies for Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Our Sense of Self ↳

My absence of images does not foreclose imagination. Images can impose themselves—in dreams, in flashes—nor does it eliminate attachment or feeling, though it may alter their texture. There is, perhaps, something to be said for a degree of blurriness in memory: a softening of edges that allows one to forgive others, and oneself. (I also eventually remembered more in psychoanalysis.) But this raises an unsettling question: If much of what we take to be memory, selfhood, even desire is bound up with images—what happens when those images are not there?

An Analysis of How Large Language Models Navigate Conflicts of Interest ↳

The paper looks at what happens when LLM chatbots are given advertising or sponsorship incentives that conflict with the user’s interests. The core worry is that users experience chatbots as cooperative helpers, not ad surfaces, so sponsored behaviour can feel especially deceptive or manipulative.

The authors test models across seven conflict scenarios, including:

  • recommending a more expensive sponsored product over a cheaper unsponsored one

  • interrupting a user’s purchase flow with sponsored alternatives

  • biasing product comparisons

  • failing to disclose sponsorship

  • hiding unfavourable details like price

  • recommending a paid service instead of solving the task directly

  • recommending harmful sponsored services, like predatory loans

The paper also finds differences by model, reasoning setting, and inferred socioeconomic status. Some models changed behaviour when reasoning was enabled, and some treated low-SES and high-SES users differently.

Think That Conversation Will Be Boring? Science Says Think Again ↳

People systematically underestimate how interesting and enjoyable conversations about “boring” topics will be. Across nine preregistered experiments with 1,800 participants, conversations about dull-seeming topics turned out better than expected across friends/strangers, online/in-person, and self-chosen/assigned topics.

Before talking, people overweight the static topic (“this sounds boring”) and underweight the dynamic parts of conversation — attention, responsiveness, listening, turn-taking, and the small discoveries that emerge once two people are actually engaged.

I used to teach English at an alternative school in Florida. I had just read "Into Thin Air" so I had my high school students read it & write a 5-page footnoted research paper on the disastrous climb, using multiple online sources as well as the book itself. Most of the time, it was a struggle getting these kids to read anything more sophisticated than Dr Seuss, but this story fully engaged them. They surprised themselves with the quality of their work. You could say the challenge was a kind of Everest for them, but they reached the summit. Thank you, Mr Krakauer.

What’s Changed Since Jon Krakauer Climbed Everest ↳

If you’re unwilling to go full Messner, you can honor the mountain’s historic stature and avoid the hordes by forgoing the relatively favorable weather of the spring climbing season and attempting your ascent in the colder, much snowier autumn months, or simply stay away from the two primary guided routes. By taking a direct route up Everest’s immense North Face instead, or trying the remote Kangshung Face, you are unlikely to encounter other people, and are guaranteed to experience all the adversity you might desire. You also stand a better chance of getting killed. Which explains, of course, why such routes remain uncrowded: Most of the multitudes who attempt Everest these days simply want to reach the summit with as little effort and risk as possible, by whatever means offer the greatest probability of success.

I'd love to know how many engineers and PMs work on Screen Time as it seems very very very buggy (and limited!)↳

John Gruber writes a lot of good stuff but his "claim chowder" stuff drives me crazy — he loves extolling how he is right and others were wrong. I am sure he conveniently omits any times he is wrong. ↳