Alex Wellerstein provides a number of poignant quotes from Matt Amis on the absurdity of nuclear weapons:

What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can’t get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.

(This blog was a recommendation in my list of readings on atomic weapons.)

the arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves. It is them or us. What do nukes do? What are they for?...Nuclear weapons deter a nuclear holocaust by threatening a nuclear holocaust, and if things go wrong then that is what you get: a nuclear holocaust. If things don’t go wrong, and continue not going wrong for the next millennium of millennia (the boasted forty years being no more than forty winks in cosmic time), you get . . . What do you get? What are we getting?

Andy Budd:

paralysis by certainty. They wait for proof. They seek validation. They endlessly test ideas looking for confidence.

But confidence often follows movement. Not the other way around

To celebrate his 40th birthday, Michael Flarup put together a list of 40 things he’s learned. A lot resonated with my own experience and reflects the same kind of advice I would give. Just a few:

Stop chasing perfect. Go for good and iterate

Try not to please everyone with the things you make. It’s your work. Make it reflect your taste.

Creative work doesn’t follow a straight line from not-good to good.

You become what you work on. The world has a tendency to feed you more of what you put into it, so make sure it’s something you like.

Showing up everyday and moving the ball, even just a little, almost always wins out over bursts of burning the midnight oil.

Find your sources of energy and wield them as tools.

Clive Thompson on the clickbaity YouTube thumbnails phenomenon:

[they] exacerbate what I've come to think of as the "spit-take-ization" of the Internet: The assumption that the only way to get our attention is to promise we're about to see something so Xtreme you just won't believe it dude.

There’s something linguistic about CSS, even in the way it fails; when you type the wrong comma or omit a certain bit of code then CSS doesn’t care. It’ll skip over it and try and understand the next bit. Just like spoken language, where you can still understand someone if you only hear 90% of what they say.