I don’t know if you’ve ever spoken to little kids about The Simpsons. I have, and I highly recommend it. Most of them recounted some version of finding the show during the pandemic.

Their knowledge is encyclopedic: Because every episode is exhaustively listed, all the kids casually threw around official episode titles for which I only had a shorthand when I was growing up. For them, the show is watched on demand in endless quantities. I asked how many episodes they think they’ve seen, and the responses were usually in the 150-to-300 range. And they all intend to watch all 750.

As I’ve humblebragged about often here, I used to run the internet’s largest website devoted to Ralph Wiggum.

Such a dubious notoriety would make you think I’ve already exposed my kids to The Simpsons, right?

Well… no.

After having roughly 30 years to reflect, what I love about the show is how much care you can tell the creators put into each episode.

Nearly every second within a typical 24-minute episode is loaded with sub jokes, perfectly timed to maximize our enjoyment and make a statement.

I really respect the show and what it meant to have as a dorky little middle schooler who felt like it was hard to get people to understand him.

I guess my hesitation with my kid, aside from the fact that she’s sassy enough as it is, is that I’m afraid she won’t get it. A lot of the jokes will fly over her head.

And maybe it’s a “shame on me” moment for not trusting one of the smartest little kids I’ve ever met.

But I guess as I edit this blog post after already posting it, maybe what I’m really afraid of is that she won’t appreciate it as much as I do.

Thankfully, this article came at an optimal point in my life, because now I have 5 examples of recent episodes I will absolutely watch with her starting tomorrow.

It’s a double whammy: I get yet another awesome bonding opportunity with my kid, and I get to face another fear of mine (that being the fear of change in life).

Maybe it’s okay for The Simpsons to not be the same it was when I was a kid. Maybe it’s both worse and better.

Maybe it’s okay for something that’s 36 years old to be different than it was back in elementary, middle, and high school.

I don't go in for ancient wisdom I don't believe just 'cause ideas are tenacious, it means that they're worthy.

I get freaked out by churches Some of the hymns that they sing have nice chords but the lyrics are dodgy.

And yes, I have all of the usual objections to the miseducation of children who, in tax-exempt institutions, are taught to externalize blame and to feel ashamed And to judge things as plain right or wrong.

But I quite like the songs.

Been a while since a Christmas song so beautifully summarized how I feel about this time of year. The third verse, which speaks directly to his then-two-year-old, really wrenched the soul.

(Shout out to my pal Ben for including this on his 2022 Christmas mixtape. Quite looking forward to his 2023 one!)

Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California and a mother to a high schooler, told me she has come to think that, for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. “I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique,” Saxbe said. “That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.” On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable—all the things a fixed identity is not.

It’s hard enough to come to the realization that you are not your anxiety or depression. Wearing it on your shirt and proudly broadcasting it to everyone doesn’t do you any favors.

Saxbe said the best thing we can do for ourselves when we’re anxious or depressed is to fight our instinct to avoid and ruminate, rather than get sucked into algorithmic wormholes of avoidance and rumination. The best thing one can do when they’re depressed is to reject the instinct to stay in bed basking in the glow of a phone, and to instead step outside, engage with a friend, or do something else that provides more opportunities for validation and reward. “I would tell people to do what’s uncomfortable, to run toward danger,” Saxbe said. “You are not your anxiety. You’re so much more.”

As I mentioned in a link from earlier today, I’ve been dealing with a rolling anxiety attack that’s lasted the better part of a full week.

I spent an afternoon in the ER because I was actually seeing changes on my Apple Watch’s ECG report when stressful thoughts would cross my mind. I could feel this deep pain in my chest, and as I write this down, I am still feeling that pain.

These pains are part of the anxiety attacks I’ve dealt with off and on for at least a decade, but unlike the other attacks, the problem with this one is that I couldn’t put my finger on why it was happening.

Besides journaling late at night with a nice, chill album playing in the background, the only thing that’s helped so far is stepping outside and engaging with friends.

It’s incredible that we live in a time where we can open up about our feelings and process difficult emotions with the help of others.

As Pete Holmes says, it helps to get into the headspace of observing your thoughts. When you notice a thought that says, “I am depressed”, you can instead say, “There is depression.”

Even if you’re not struggling with your mental health right now, it’s worth checking out that Pete Holmes video so you can have another tool at your disposal in the off chance you find yourself in depressionland.

I am a huge game show fan. A little known fact about me: whenever I go to a hotel, the first thing I do is turn on the TV and find Game Show Network¹.

A few months ago, my wife came across Game Changer on YouTube and was like “you need to watch this.”

Ever since, we have been gigantic Dropout fans. We binged the entirety of Game Changer, which is simply a brilliant show with a rotating cast of outstanding comedians.

After going through Game Changer, we started branching into other shows from the network. We are currently making our way through Breaking News, where four people have to read from a teleprompter in a faux news setting without smiling or laughing. It's stupid, it's incredibly funny, and they keep finding ways to switch up the style of humor so the premise doesn't get tired.

As you spend more time in the Dropout universe with shows like Um, Actually and Dimension 20, you start to get that feeling that you get when you spend a lot of time listening to someone's podcast or following their YouTube channel. You start to look forward to episodes with certain people. You see one of your favorites wrote an episode and you feel comfortable, that same confident feeling you get when you see someone take the stage and just know they're going to lead you through the show without any moments of unintended cringe.

I love subscribing to Dropout because it feels like I'm supporting a group of genuinely great people who work their asses off to give me and my wife a few moments of levity at the end of our day. You get this feeling that you're actually supporting people and not a company.

If you haven't given Dropout a chance yet, I highly recommend watching this playlist on YouTube. If you love that, you will definitely love the rest of the absurd Game Changer series.

Why do we hate bureaucracy?

Taken literally, a bureaucracy is just an organization tasked with ensuring some outcome. In the public sector, OSHA ensures worker safety, FDA ensures drug safety, EPA ensures environmental protection; in the private sector, HR ensures legal compliance, IT ensures trade secrets and data privacy, and so on. Yet even if people agree with the outcome, they often disagree with the implementation. Bureaucracies have an endless talent for finding wasteful and ineffective solutions.

Bureaucracies are ineffective due to a lack of accountability. If a bureaucrat imposes a wasteful policy, what are the consequences? Well, as long as they are achieving their desired outcome, they are doing their job, regardless of the pain they inflict on others. They can wield legal, technical, or financial penalties to force compliance. And paradoxically, when bureaucrats fail to achieve their desired outcome, they often get a bigger budget or a bigger stick to wield, rather than being fired for incompetence. The inability to recognize failure goes hand in hand with the inability to recognize success: competent and ambitious people avoid working for bureaucracies because their efforts go unrewarded. Bureaucracies end up staffed with middling managers, and we have learned to hate them.

I don’t know how to solve this problem in the public sector, but I think it’s solvable in the private sector, because there is theoretically a CEO who is incentivized to maximize the overall effectiveness of the company; they just need the right tactics. The solution is simple: hold bureaucracy accountable by forcing them to do the actual work.

I feel like there’s a counter argument to be made in here about the role of competition in the work produced for external entities to do.

In a functioning capitalistic system, you have several competing entrepreneurs who are testing all kinds of novel ideas against the rules established by the government to ensure a safe, fair playing field.

The role of a bureaucracy is not to get to the end goal faster. The role of bureaucracy is to make sure we get to the end goal without taking harmful shortcuts.

Regardless, there is something to be said about being thoughtful in imposing burdensome policies, and I think this concept of bureaucratic leverage is an interesting way to consider the role of the public sector in optimizing our systems.

Reports of Baby Boomers worried that younger generations lack the motivation and morals of their parents were met with pictures of a 1974 hippie commune and a plea from 28-year-old Travis Garner who said, “Look, every generation eventually figures it out and finds their own way. We’ll be fine.”

In California, 18-year-old Sarah Thompson began her freshman biology class at UC Davis where she’ll learn stuff we didn’t know when her parents went to college, while she won’t be taught stuff that’s since been proven false. “That’s how progress works,” her professor said. “A slow grind higher over the generations.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 48 points on Tuesday. Greg Jones, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, expected that no one would care about that useless, vapid, fact by tomorrow.

See, this is the kind of article that makes my five-day-long anxiety attack start to subside.

Slow and steady progress wins the race. Relax. Take your time. Be just a tiny bit better every day.

I can understand how a VGA signal works when you give me a schematic and I’ll probably be able to program something for it. I can understand single-threaded CPU architectures and can probably write assembly or an emulator for it. But I have a lot of trouble understanding the internals of the digital 4K HDMI/USB-C output port, and even if you give me three months, I will never grasp even the basics of what’s under the hood of modern CPU chips. That’s a shame.

In that sense, I’m a bit worried that we’re over-engineering everything just because we can. Something that a single person could understand in 1993 now requires a dedicated team with ten years of experience.

On the one hand, I bet the DOOM team felt the same way thirty years ago about the confusing and complex systems of the mid-1990s.

But on the other, I definitely sympathize with the author. I feel spoiled that I was able to mostly learn how to program websites by right-clicking and viewing source.

Have you ever tried doing that on a modern website? It’s complete gibberish. Everything is obfuscated behind embedded, compressed Javascript libraries and CSS styling that is intentionally complex to prevent things like ad blocking tech from discovering which <div> blocks to hide.

Regardless, we should all wish a very happy birthday to DOOM.

I am currently looking at my Nalgene bottle of stickers and fondly looking at the Chex Quest one.

Also, I will never forget iddqd, idkfa, and idbehold.

Now, if the video had said at the start, “This is a stylized representation of interactions our researchers tested,” no one would have batted an eye — we kind of expect videos like this to be half factual, half aspirational.

But the video is called “Hands-on with Gemini” and when they say it shows “our favorite interactions,” it implies that the interactions we see are those interactions. They were not. Sometimes they were more involved; sometimes they were totally different; sometimes they don’t really appear to have happened at all. We’re not even told what model it is — the Gemini Pro one people can use now, or (more likely) the Ultra version slated for release next year?

Should we have assumed that Google was only giving us a flavor video when they described it the way they did? Perhaps then we should assume all capabilities in Google AI demos are being exaggerated for effect. I write in the headline that this video was “faked.” At first I wasn’t sure if this harsh language was justified (certainly Google doesn’t; a spokesperson asked me to change it). But despite including some real parts, the video simply does not reflect reality. It’s fake.

This video melted my face off yesterday because I took it at face value. Despite the disclaimer at the beginning of the video, I assumed the edits were merely to speed things up and gave it the benefit of the doubt.

If they would’ve presented an unedited interaction showing exactly where they’re at… sure, it might not have been as impressive, but it would’ve been authentic. It would still be valuable to show that they’re still in the game despite how far ahead OpenAI currently is.

This, though? It’s 2023. What even was the point of this? This was clearly not presented as an aspirational video; it was titled “hands on with Gemini”.

It’s hard not to take this video as a desparate attempt to make Google look way, way better than they may actually be.

I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers and everyone else who keeps airlines operating. And the pilot of the plane I flew in. And thousands of other people at the airport and on the plane, any of which could have attacked me. And all the people that prepared and served my breakfast, and the entire food supply chain—any of them could have poisoned me. When I landed here, I trusted thousands more people: at the airport, on the road, in this building, in this room. And that was all before 10:30 this morning.

Trust is essential to society. Humans as a species are trusting. We are all sitting here, mostly strangers, confident that nobody will attack us. If we were a roomful of chimpanzees, this would be impossible. We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can’t function without it. And that we don’t even think about it is a measure of how well it all works.

This is an exceptional article and should be required reading for all my fellow AI dorks.

Humans are great at ascribing large, amorphous entities with a human-like personality that allow us to trust them. In some cases, that manifests as a singular person (e.g. Steve Jobs with Apple, Elon Musk with :shudders: X, Michael Jordan with the Chicago Bulls).

That last example made me think of a behind the scenes video I watched last night that covered everything that goes into preparing for a Tampa Bay Buccaneers game. It's amazing how many details are scrutinized by a team of people who deeply care about a football game.

There's a woman who knows the preferred electrolyte mix flavoring for each player.

There's a guy who builds custom shoulder pads with velcro strips to ensure each player is comfortable and resilient to holds.

There's a person who coordinates the schedule to ensure the military fly over occurs exactly at the last line of the national anthem.

But when you think of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from two years ago, you don't think of those folks. You think of Tom Brady.

And in order for Tom Brady to go out on the field and be Tom Brady, he trusts that his electrolytes are grape, his sleeves on his jersey are nice and loose¹, and his stadium is packed with raucous, high-energy fans.

And in order for us to trust virtually anyone in our modern society, we need governments that are stable, predictable, reliable, and constantly standing up to those powerful entities who would otherwise abuse the system's trust. That includes Apple, X, and professional sports teams.

Oh! All of this also reminds me of a fantastic Bluey episode about trust. That show is a masterpiece and should be required viewing for everyone (not just children).

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight.

One of my first attempts at building a website occurred in the Enchanted Forest section of GeoCities.