Atoms vs Bits

By Uri — Jun 12, 2026 I've had the chance to live in a lot of different places, and have come to a mildly surprising conclusion: it's cars that make living in the city stressful. Basically I have lived in cities which were not very dense but which, due to road-placement, had a lot of traffic around them and it stressed me out. I have likewise lived in places which were dense with tall buildings but for idiosyncratic reasons had very little car-traffic and they did not stress me out.

a guest post from dear friend-of-the-blog Kester Imagine that you (like most humans who lived between the years of 2000 BC and 1910 AD) live in a society where carts are commonly pulled by horses. One day, you see a man on the side of the road with two horses hitched to a cart. The man appears to be stuck: the horses and the cart are not moving. The man knows that something has to be done. So, he starts pleading with the cart to move forward, explaining carefully what he needs it to do.

Here's a trick I like to use when attempting to estimate land areas: planes fly at roughly 500 miles per hour. If you know roughly how many hours it takes to fly across a place, and roughly how long it takes to fly from top to bottom, you can estimate roughly how large the land mass is. For example: The United States Width: Flying from Boston to Seattle takes roughly 6 hours. 6 times 500 is 3000, so the US is roughly ~3000 miles wide. Height: Flying from Seattle to Los Angeles takes roughly 2 hours.

Important caveat to all of this: for some people, alcohol is addictive and life-derailing. It's very hard to say this without sounding corny but if you think there's any chance you're one of those people, please talk to someone instead of reading this blogpost. I've had friends who've had good experiences with AA and there's also a drug you can take.

I've been thinking lately about how many years I've spent reading things from the internet, and how few of them I remember. So I'm continuing a little series on Pieces Of Internet Writing That Have Actually Stuck With Me. Next up: Tim Tebow Chronicles, by Jon Bois. (Heads up that a lot of this review is self-plagiarized from myself ~4 years ago).

Is This Anything? was a long running series I did on this blog, and I guess I'm now reviving. It's named after the thing standup comics say when testing out new, rough material. Arguably most of the blog is already that, but this is even more so. I have what's best described as a destructive but passionate on-again-off-again relationship with Twitter.

By Uri — Jun 3, 2026 Do you want to be in a Fermi Estimates club with me? Reply to this email. I'm really not sure at this point which ideas from behavioral economics are actually true, and which are just specious. But if the idea of endowment effects is real (and broadly applicable), much of the advice in the world is wrong. "Endowment Effects" is the idea that we value something more because its ours.

By Uri — Jun 2, 2026 One of my favourite words is deliberate: I long to live more of my life deliberately. E.g. I'm fascinated by the coffee hobbyist community. People like James Hoffman make these wildly specific, wildly popular videos dialling in every element of the coffee-making process: how many grams of beans, how small should you grind them? How many grams of water, and at what temperature?

By Uri — Jun 1, 2026 As a policy, I don't "name names" on this blog. If I'm speaking about anyone negatively (or in a way that might be perceived as negative), I will generally refer to them in an abstracted and anonymzed form. The reason is basically just a cost-benefit analysis, and here's how it works: My sense is that there is a high fixed cost to ever criticizing someone by name: if it reaches them or their fans, they are likely to be annoyed.

I've been reading the internet for more than a decade now, and most of it has washed over me like Tagore's wings. So I'm writing some reviews of pieces that stuck with me. What It’s Actually Like to Be on House Hunters—Twice Later, a complete stranger saw me in an airport and identified me as “the Crazy Bathtub Lady.” Like me, you may have long assumed that reality TV shows were not exact descriptions of reality. Still, I thought this was just at the level of selective editing and choice of focus.