This started as a comment on Hacker News. I need a browser extension to capture comments on forums and social media as blog drafts. Here is one of a small number of things I consider indisputable: **It's impossible to make self or mind small enough to be safe from attacks on self or mind.** We often fear that, once fully-developed as people, we'll present a larger attack surface. The truth is having the confidence of a personality built on experience, introspection, and intent makes you better able to shrug off the arrows. Anyway. The proper rank for advice: **Best** : advice given with awareness of your specific situation from people with relevant experience. Ignore rich people telling **you** how to live, but do listen to rich people telling you how **they** live. **Near Top** : advice that isn't intended to be advice like personal stories shared on blogs. Anecdotes and stories can be inspiring and motivating, but aren't easy to apply unless what you need is inspiration or motivation. **Middle** : solicited advice. People most ready to give advice usually either haven't lived enough or are out of touch in general or with your specific needs. Refer back to the advice on listening to rich people above for an example. **Bottom** : unsolicited advice. People who haven't looked for a job in 30 years love to tell people how to get a job in the 21st century. This is the domain of people who jump at any chance to quote famous people out of context at people who didn't ask. For example: Warren Buffet has a lot of interesting and sometimes good advice, but second-hand sources pluck out the most quotable bit and present it free of context. I refer back to the advice up there on listening to rich people. Much of Buffet's advice takes the form of "here's how I live and what I consider the merits of that lifestyle" rather than dictates from on high. I don't think he would ever scold people for spending $20 on avocado toast. Much less suggest a rare splurge is why they can't afford a house. ### Some more notions: Some advice is not for you. Some advice is not for who you are _today_. There is no magic year of life that bestows unique value on advice. Toddlers can say some really smart stuff, and 80 year olds sometimes stopped learning in their 20s. Developing a refined and well-practiced discernment is as important as sourcing your opinions from diverse perspectives. Everyone has bias. Class, wealth (which is different from class), politics, identity, ideology, context, proximity to lunch time, anchoring to things we heard one time and never checking in to see if the facts were exaggerated or failed to replicate. The list goes on. The more you're aware of your own passive inputs (bias), the sharper your lens on the world. Having a balanced view on things is better than an extreme view. However, balance as an ideological stance is easily manipulated by extremists. It's healthy to guard your own personal Overton window by holding on to a few people a little bit further along in either direction so you know when your mind starts changing. Change is good, but make sure it's _you_ making the changes. For example: I had good friends to point me toward bell hooks and Judith Butler when I started expressing some sour opinions on feminism in the 2010s. Overall: it's hard to divorce major influences and turning points in our lives from their context, and that's why good general advice is so hard to give and equally hard to implement. Take the advice you can and weave it into the growing tapestry of your life. Your path will be fully unique to you. ## Stuff I Return To Often Everyone should do a quick run through Farnam Street's page on mental models. https://fs.blog/mental-models/ Take note of the ones that resonate, maybe journal a little, and move on. Do it again every few years. Like watching an old TV show for the nth time, the stuff that resonates changes with time, and that realization can be informative. Merlin Mann has a wisdom file that's always under development. His advice here is good: > Related: for any idea that strikes you as irrelevant or dumb or wrong or antithetical to your own experiences and sensibilities, please consider that it may not be, as we say, for you. The reader is encouraged to ignore or reject any ideas that they find undesirable. The Technium has a list that turned into a book. I haven't read the book yet and may never get to it. Standard Ebooks has a small number of books, a little over 100 as I write this, and they're all worth at least a peek. Sorting by popularity will show a lot of familiar books. Start at the end and work backward instead. I don't know if the least popular, Mr. Incoul’s Misadventure, is any good, but someone put a lot of work into making it more accessible to modern readers. You might discover why by reading it. Corollary: investigating the least popular entries in a list sorted by popularity can lead to rare insights. This is especially true of short lists where each entry represents effort. Beyond that, read widely, take good notes, and try not to let any single input change you unless you **choose** that change.

This guy I met in the lounge at a hotel had interesting stories about a long career traveling around Japan, but he made the storyteller's fatal mistake when he broke suspension of disbelief by not being able to answer a basic question about the Shinkansen. "What was Japan's train network called? Shinasomething?" "I don't know." I think it dawned on him later that he failed the test because he avoided me until he was off on his next travels.

I spent a long time thinking Being Human and Humans were the same show with a rename in the middle of its run, like Seaquest received in its time. It turns out Humans, at least the US version I watched, is Friends meets The Originals without the uncertainty about how they afford their apartment. There are people who will tell you the UK version is superior. There are people who say that for every US remake. Sorry, I just can't seem to get into most UK media. I have the same problem with the anime that makes its way over here outside a few shows like Fullmetal Alchemist and Digimon. There is no accounting for taste, and that's okay.

Circumstances aligned recently to allow me to catch up on The Walking Dead. I started with spinoffs: Dead City and Daryl Dixon. I had already watched most of Fear The Walking Dead and the first season of World Beyond. Fear was better about not lingering. World Beyond was too much teen drama, but I don't think it was meant for me. The spinoffs aren't bad. Season 11 of the original series was okay. I just can't seem to find the interest to keep going on the earlier seasons I missed without that lost community aspect we had on social media back then. Maybe it's not really about The Walking Dead; maybe it's about the communal feeling that seems increasingly hard to access in our modern world, and that made the pacing more bearable by giving us time and space to discuss things. There's an alternative universe where someone with influence made The Walking Dead fix its pacing issues before the entire fandom vaporized. If you were one of the original fans of the show, you remember it dominating Twitter with every episode. For a while. Having all these spinoffs exploring the world of The Walking Dead would have been the jackpot for me back then. Anyway. At least give it a watch. I dropped out at the Whispers. Some people dropped out all the way back at the farm, or the prison. Try the spinoffs as soon as it stops being fun to watch. I find it's best not to linger on things you don't enjoy. That's how you become that person who bursts into every conversation about the thing to complain, even if the conversation was positive about the thing.

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Many years ago I asked on one social media site or another what the next big crash would come from after 2008. Subprime auto loans were the top suggestion. HN Search powered by AlgoliaHacker News Search, millions articles and comments at your fingertips.HN Search August 2025: Cars are so expensive that buyers need seven-year loans | Hacker NewsHacker News September 2025: Americans crushed by auto loans as defaults and repossessions surge | Hacker NewsHacker News October 2025: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans | Hacker NewsHacker News And just two days before I drafted this article, a major subprime auto loan company went under. We're seeing a flurry of headlines in the last month about subprime auto loans. The problem is: this is a recurring headline, year after year, and no one who made a bet based on one would have won or lost by now. Let's review. January 2015: Investment Riches Built on Subprime Auto Loans to Poor | Hacker NewsHacker News March 2016: Unpaid subprime auto loans hit 20-year high | Hacker NewsHacker News January 2017, it's on people's minds: Ask HN: What is the next bubble in your opinion? | Hacker NewsHacker News October 2022, over 5 years later: Wall Street Warns of Trouble Brewing in Auto Loans as Prices Dip | Hacker NewsHacker News November 2023, a year later: Delinquencies rise on mortgages, auto loans and credit cards | Hacker NewsHacker News Let me make this clear in case it sounds like I'm downplaying the problem: subprime auto loans are a problem. But the thing that kicks the economy in front of the bus is generally not something you see in headlines before it happens. As I write this, the US government is shut down. Federal workers are furloughed. SNAP benefits are expected to run out, and November payments might be delayed just in time for the holiday season. Like 2008, we're looking at a sequence of events unfolding that could be the thing to kick the economy over the ledge. Most likely, someone will blink, a bill will be passed, and we'll all memory hole this until the next one. If I had money to bet, it would be on the failure of one of the big chatbot companies drawing fear and scrutiny to the AI market, leading to a bank failure, leading to long-deferred scrutiny of market fundamentals across the economy. Consider 2020 and the early days of covid-19: businesses suddenly discovered a capacity for allowing working from home. Grocery delivery took off, and you can call an Uber for the big stuff. Commercial real estate took a huge hit because its value is often used as the basis for loans to buy more real estate. Drop the rents or sell for less to respond to structural changes, the value goes down, and triggers for things people like to avoid written into debt terms go off. So they don't, and you get headlines about apocalyptic office parks. When the catalyst comes, will people be as resistant as in 2008 to letting their cars go when economic pressure forces them to make hard decisions? Will return to office prove to be a short-lived thing? If so, will it accelerate the long trend toward urbanization? If that happens and office work moves to corner shops and downtown coworking spaces, how long can real estate companies pretend like their massive office complexes in the middle of nowhere are worth anything with no one in them and no viable way to redevelop them for other things? No one knows until the music stops. When it does, it will take years to shake out, and it will be some thing only industry insiders knew anything about. There will have been warnings, but insiders get caught up in the boom and, if they see the bust coming, don't know how to avoid it. ## What do do instead of watching the headlines * **Diversify skills** : specialization is great when times are good, but requires you to be among the best at what you do. Becoming more adaptable will serve you better in the long run. You might not be the best musician or writer, for example, but you can combine them in a unique way that appeals to enough people to provide a little extra money * **Mutual aid** : Get to know the people and organizations already supporting your community. They aren't all religious. Probably. * **Community** : Find your local Discord servers, blogs, and forums. At least have an idea of what's going on. Local Facebook groups are dominated by people posting ads even when the group explicitly forbids it, and Nextdoor is mostly lost pets and people calling cops on neighbors they never met. You might notice I didn't say anything about "networking." That's fine to do, but it should flow naturally from the other things. When you put out notice you need a job, food, or just someone to hang out with, you'll do better with people who already know you. Networking is a good way to get an introduction for an interview. Being known for what you do is a good way to get offered a position created for you. And sometimes people have too much of one thing or too little of another and are happy to swap or give away. If I were going to stick to one recommendation, it would be to read Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World. It's what set me on the path to developing a healthy skepticism built on empathy and patience rather than scorn and cynicism. Hate never changed a mind for the better, and skepticism is why I don't flap in the wind of headlines. The next is 1984. George Orwell was a keen observer of politics and human nature. The book is often mistaken as a look at a possible future. In reality, it's a collection of models of political tendencies. After you read it, the difference between people who refer to the book but haven't read it and people who have is stark. You'll see real-world examples that could have inspired Syme's monologue on Newspeak everywhere.

Spend any time immersed in music discussions and you'll see people ask why 4/4 is so popular. The short and most precise answer to all questions of music and music theory is: centuries of changing traditions spanning the rise and fall of empires lead (and led) to ever-shifting conventions and it just so happens that 4/4 is popular in our little snapshot of time. In fact, it's so ubiquitous that we call it common time and gave it its own little symbol. As musicians try to break out of it in the 2020s heading into the 2030s, it's likely other meters and music that defies simple numeric description will take the lead and 4/4 will fall out of favor for a while. The long answer to "why is 4/4 popular?" is that no one really knows for sure, but there are some great candidates for an answer. Personally, it's familiar and Ableton Live defaults to it, so I tend to just roll with it. In general, the causality goes both ways: 4/4 is popular because everyone uses it, and everyone uses it because it's popular. It's the same situation with pianos being built around the Major scale. Play all the white keys from C to C, you get C Major. Play from D to D, D Major, and so on. We end up with a lot of music written in modes of Major. The black keys, five of them, are naturally pentatonic as a result of their role of providing flats and sharps to create minor modes from Major, so end up in a lot of dance music where simple jumpy melodies do best. 4/4 is just one way of marking time for music. You could come up with any number of ways to mark that time and get the same result. You can even throw in some irregular beats like some music traditions do and arrive back at the regular beat when it's all considered as a whole. The generally agreed upon answer is: 4/4 sounds good and you can dance to it. Here are some high quality discussions I found while researching this question. What made 4/4 time the most common time signature?Most music is written in 4/4 time, and in today’s world it seems to be the accepted norm. Now, that doesn’t mean mainstream music doesn’t use alternate meters, but it’s just less common than I imag…Music: Practice & Theory Stack ExchangeTaco > Has 4/4 always been the most 'natural' time signature for music? Is there a reason for it? > by u/anyonethinkingabout in askscience Here's one for you to ponder: why does everyone want to know about 4/4 and not the equally popular 3/4, like in Billy Joel's Piano Man? Or the somewhat popular 5/4 you might know from Mission Impossible. Or the 7/4 of Pink Floyd's Money. Or a mix of 3/4 (verse) and 4/4 (chorus) like "Lucy in the sky with diamonds" And the answer is the same: each one rises and falls in popularity as people find a way to use it. The songs up there probably influenced a boom of other songs with the same meter. If you have other quizzical queries about ordinary things, drop me a line. ## Sign up for Kye Fox Official site of writer and musician Kye Fox. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

I like trivia. Some influences: * Imponderables - The word imponderable itself is, according to Merriam-Webster, from 1794, but the series ran from 1986-2006. It asked the kind of questions I ask about everyday things like: why _are_ the wafers they cut CPUs out of round when the CPUs are rectangles and squares? * The Guinness Book of World Records - I read a few of the actual book cover to cover! * Forums and chatrooms - You meet all kinds of people who know things and like to share. It's been a while since I emailed you because what I was doing wasn't working. Meanwhile, the notion to start a Q&A/advice column type newsletter has recurred for over a decade at this point. So I'm going to try that here with the 129 of you who've signed up to the list. I want to know those oddball ponderings you can't quite figure out how to search for, but know must have an answer. By the way: the answer for "why _are_ the wafers they cut CPUs out of round when the CPUs are rectangles and squares?" is: the modern process that drives everyone towards TMSC's ever-shrinking nodes starts with spinning silicon in a process called the Czochralski method which produces round ingots of silicon called a boule, and spinning tends to produce rounds things. You can see an explanation for different processes for producing silicon here. And you can see a video that details the process of turning these wafers into CPUs here. You can sign up or manage your subscription here. I'll set up a dedicated newsletter for this if it takes off. So: what's **your** imponderable? Reply and let me know. I'll answer it in the newsletter if I can.