Talking to 35 Strangers at the Gym

Published: May 1, 2026 Updated: May 4, 2026

Background

A cou­ple months ago, I was the Wizard of Loneliness. I had grad­u­ated from col­lege al­most two years prior and, while I had luck­ily found a job, I was un­suc­cess­ful in find­ing friends.

Each night, I would look up “how to make friends af­ter col­lege” and find the same ad­vice given every time: “do your hobby with other peo­ple, fre­quently”.

On pa­per, the gym seemed like the per­fect op­por­tu­nity to meet peo­ple since I would go there nearly every day; how­ever, ac­cord­ing to Reddit, there’s a num­ber of peo­ple who want to be left alone and can be ir­ri­tated if you in­ter­rupted their work­out to talk.

I am deeply afraid of ir­ri­tat­ing some­one or be­ing in awk­ward sit­u­a­tions. Here’s a list of things that I did as a re­sult of that fear:

Hesitated for a cou­ple min­utes be­fore wak­ing up my room­mate when the fire alarm went off

Hesitated for a cou­ple min­utes be­fore wak­ing up my room­mate when the fire alarm went off

Pretended I did­n’t know a child­hood friend when they said hi be­cause I did­n’t know how to act around peo­ple I used to know

Pretended I did­n’t know a child­hood friend when they said hi be­cause I did­n’t know how to act around peo­ple I used to know

Ignored peo­ple I knew from class in­stead of say­ing hi be­cause I did­n’t know for sure if they re­mem­bered me even though the class had only 10 peo­ple in it

Ignored peo­ple I knew from class in­stead of say­ing hi be­cause I did­n’t know for sure if they re­mem­bered me even though the class had only 10 peo­ple in it

So you can un­der­stand when I say that walk­ing up to some­one and start­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with them at the gym of all places is kinda ter­ri­fy­ing for me.

Unfortunately, there was no other good op­tion. My other hobby is pro­gram­ming, but the Syracuse Development group only meets up once a month, and ac­tiv­i­ties sug­gested by r/​Syra­cuse like vol­ley­ball and trivia night re­quire you to al­ready have friends. I did­n’t have a choice. If I wanted friends, I would have to put in the work at the gym.

Problem Statement

I am lonely and have no friends.

Procedure

I de­cided to run a lit­tle ex­per­i­ment to find some friends.

Each day, for one month, I picked out one per­son to ap­proach. Usually it would be some­one I saw fre­quently at the gym.

If they were in the mid­dle of an ex­er­cise, I waited for them to fin­ish their set.

Then, I would ap­proach them, stand near them and wave to get their at­ten­tion, and then give them my open­ing line.

Initially, my open­ing line for every­one was “Hey I see you here all the time. You’re pretty strong. What’s your split?” After a week or so, I be­gan cus­tomiz­ing the open­ing line per per­son based on what I found in­ter­est­ing about them.

For in­stance, some­one was wear­ing a Boston hat and I was cu­ri­ous whether they went to school in Boston like I did, so I asked them about it. After the open­ing line, I tried to talk to them for 5 – 10 min­utes un­til they let me go. I tried not to be the one to end it be­cause I have a habit of end­ing con­ver­sa­tions early, but I did leave them alone if they ob­vi­ously did not want to talk.

Results

Here’s the raw data. I split it up by week and put it into these col­lapsi­ble things be­cause it takes up a lot of space. Click on each week to see the data for that week.

Description is a short de­scrip­tion of the per­son.

Length is how long the con­ver­sa­tion was. A short con­ver­sa­tion is 0 – 2 min­utes, a medium con­ver­sa­tion is 5 – 7 min­utes, and a long con­ver­sa­tion is 10+ min­utes.

Notes are just any­thing in­ter­est­ing about the con­ver­sa­tion or the per­son I was talk­ing to.

Aftermath is what hap­pened af­ter that con­ver­sa­tion.

Reflection

The first cou­ple days were ex­tremely dif­fi­cult. I had been con­di­tioned to be­lieve that ini­ti­at­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger was weird and it was tough to break free from that. As a re­sult, for the first few peo­ple, I would al­ways make a de­tour at the last sec­ond, i.e. make a trip to the wa­ter foun­tain. I chick­ened out! The so­lu­tion was to ap­proach the per­son as quickly as pos­si­ble so that I did­n’t have time to think about run­ning away.

Luckily, most peo­ple were re­cep­tive. I got a rush of dopamine when­ever some­one re­sponded pos­i­tively to my con­ver­sa­tion, so talk­ing to new peo­ple be­came strangely ad­dic­tive. I kept talk­ing to more and more new peo­ple each day un­til I talked to a whop­ping seven (SIX SEVENNN) new peo­ple in one day (this is why Week 3 has a lot of en­tries). It was crazy.

Something in­ter­est­ing I learned early on was that even if some­one had head­phones on, there was a good chance they were open to con­ver­sa­tion. I mean, I had my ear­buds in and I was will­ing to talk to any­body. Most peo­ple were just lis­ten­ing to mu­sic and took the head­phones off to talk.

People did­n’t al­ways re­spond pos­i­tively though. In Week 1 and Week 2, I came across a num­ber of peo­ple who were re­ally short with their re­sponses and did­n’t try to con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion. They gave off the vibe that they did­n’t want to talk to me. It was re­ally awk­ward and al­most made me end the ex­per­i­ment.

But over time, I came to ac­cept that it’s ok if they did­n’t want to talk to me. That’s just one of the things you have to ex­pect when you do some­thing like this.

And be­ing in an awk­ward sit­u­a­tion is ac­tu­ally not that bad. It sucks in the mo­ment, but then you just take a few min­utes to calm down and then you move on with your life. You’re ok.

However, I did end up pulling back in Week 4 and Week 5. I felt like con­stantly talk­ing to more new peo­ple was pro­duc­ing di­min­ish­ing re­turns. I had al­ready es­tab­lished a con­nec­tion with many peo­ple at the gym, so it was a bet­ter use of my lim­ited time (remember I still have to work out!) to nur­ture those ex­ist­ing con­nec­tions into mean­ing­ful ones.

I ended up pri­or­i­tiz­ing the 5 – 6 peo­ple who seemed the most in­ter­ested in me.

One of these peo­ple is some­one I will re­fer to as “the other Asian guy”. I got a lot closer to him than ex­pected. We re­al­ized we had the same work­out rou­tine so we be­came gym bud­dies and started work­ing out to­gether. A few weeks later, he in­vited me to his apart­ment, where he cooked me a smash burger. His girl­friend showed me graphic pic­tures of what she was learn­ing in PA school too. Then, we watched a movie with their cat. I’m re­ally grate­ful that they were kind enough to have me over as a guest.

Also, some­thing new hap­pened: in­stead of scar­ing peo­ple away, I had a pos­i­tive im­pact on some­one.

These texts were from one of the peo­ple I pri­or­i­tized, the male SU stu­dent. He had re­cently moved to Syracuse and was strug­gling to make new friends. He re­lated to a cou­ple of my videos where I talked about the same strug­gles and was su­per ap­pre­cia­tive that I talked to him that day. The fol­low­ing week, we tried out Kofta Burger af­ter a rec­om­men­da­tion from my friend who lives down­town.

The burger was de­li­cious and we had a great time.

Despite my suc­cesses, my work is­n’t done. I re­al­ized near the end of the month that what I truly wanted was to con­sis­tently hang out with peo­ple on the week­ends. Unfortunately, most of the friends I’ve made are busy on the week­end. They’re tak­ing trips to visit loved ones, go­ing to the bar (I’m not that into drink­ing), or run­ning er­rands, so it’s hard to plan any­thing.

But I guess that’s a bet­ter prob­lem to have than eter­nal lone­li­ness.

A few months ago, I was googling “how to make friends af­ter col­lege” every night. Now I have peo­ple to text, peo­ple to wave to at the gym, and peo­ple who no­tice when I don’t show up for a few days. AND I be­came a more re­silient per­son who is un­afraid to do hard and scary things.

No more Wizard of Loneliness for me!

Heh this blew up on HackerNews. I want to give some more con­text for peo­ple who are un­sure if the gym was the right place to do this. And this is all in hind­sight; I did not re­al­ize this un­til now.

The gym I go to, Crunch Fitness, has a so­cial as­pect to it. While many peo­ple keep to them­selves, it’s com­mon to see peo­ple chat­ting. Sometimes they’re chat­ting in be­tween sets. Other times, they’re chat­ting on the tread­mill. The staff go out of their way to in­ter­act with us, and of­ten the peo­ple who did­n’t want to talk to me talk to other peo­ple! I guess they are more open with their friends.

The peo­ple at the gym are also re­ally sup­port­ive. I for­got to men­tion this but once, when I was do­ing hip thrusts, I messed up and did­n’t rerack the ma­chine cor­rectly. I fell on my butt and the ma­chine made a huge CLANK sound when it fell. Everybody turned to look at me. I was re­ally em­barassed. But then, one guy came and helped me re­turn the ma­chine to the start­ing po­si­tion while an­other guy swung by to make sure I was ok. He as­sured me that it hap­pened to every­one and to not let it get to me. I did­n’t know ei­ther of these peo­ple! They just wanted to help.

I don’t dis­agree that the gym is pri­mar­ily a place to work­out, but I think that it’s also a place where you can find com­mu­nity. Maybe my gym is spe­cial in how so­cial it is but maybe peo­ple are friend­lier than they ap­pear to be. I’m bet­ting on the lat­ter.

Starting in 2027, there will be a no­tice­able change for smart­phones in the EU: The re­mov­able bat­tery is mak­ing a come­back. What used to be stan­dard is re­turn­ing due to le­gal re­quire­ments for new mod­els.

What ex­actly can we ex­pect?

Starting February 18, 2027, new smart­phones and tablets must be de­signed so that end users can re­move and re­place the bat­tery them­selves us­ing stan­dard tools. Adhesive bonds that re­quire heat to be re­moved will then be largely pro­hib­ited.

Specifically, this means the fol­low­ing for new mod­els start­ing in February 2027:

Easy re­place­ment: Batteries must be re­place­able us­ing stan­dard tools (e.g., screw­drivers).

No bar­ri­ers: The use of ad­he­sives that can only be re­moved with heat or sol­vents is pro­hib­ited.

Tools: If a spe­cial tool is re­quired for re­place­ment, the man­u­fac­turer must pro­vide it free of charge.

Spare parts guar­an­tee: Replacement bat­ter­ies must be avail­able to end users at a rea­son­able price for at least 5 years.

Why is the EU in­tro­duc­ing this?

The main dri­ver is the tran­si­tion to a true cir­cu­lar econ­omy. Currently, smart­phones are of­ten re­placed as soon as bat­tery per­for­mance de­clines, which wastes enor­mous amounts of re­sources.

Waste pre­ven­tion: Millions of tons of elec­tronic waste are gen­er­ated in the EU every year. Easily re­place­able bat­ter­ies sig­nif­i­cantly ex­tend the lifes­pan of de­vices.

Cost sav­ings: Many users shy away from ex­pen­sive re­pairs or buy­ing new de­vices. The EU es­ti­mates that con­sumers could save tens of bil­lions of eu­ros in to­tal by 2030 thanks to longer us­age cy­cles.

Resource con­ser­va­tion: Batteries con­tain valu­able raw ma­te­ri­als such as lithium and cobalt. If they are eas­ily re­mov­able, they can be sorted by type and re­cy­cled more ef­fi­ciently.

Fire safety: Batteries that are per­ma­nently glued in place are of­ten dam­aged dur­ing shred­ding, which re­peat­edly leads to dan­ger­ous fires in sort­ing fa­cil­i­ties. Clean re­moval sig­nif­i­cantly in­creases safety in the re­cy­cling process.

What does this mean for users?

DIY re­pairs: Instead of pay­ing a lot of money to visit a re­pair ser­vice, you sim­ply buy the re­place­ment part and swap it out your­self.

Higher re­sale value: Used cell phones can be resold much more eas­ily and for a higher price with a brand-new bat­tery.

Longer soft­ware sup­port: Since the hard­ware lasts longer, there is also in­creased pres­sure on man­u­fac­tur­ers to of­fer se­cu­rity up­dates for a longer pe­riod.

Will this make smart­phones thicker or less wa­ter­proof?

That is the key chal­lenge for de­sign­ers.

Modern de­vices are of­ten bonded to­gether to make them par­tic­u­larly thin and wa­ter­proof.

Removable bat­ter­ies make this de­sign more dif­fi­cult, but not im­pos­si­ble.

Manufacturers are al­ready work­ing on so­lu­tions, such as:

new seals in­stead of ad­he­sive,

more ro­bust cas­ings with screw mech­a­nisms,

mod­u­lar in­ter­nal struc­tures.

Many users fear that cell phones will break im­me­di­ately if they get wet in the rain or fall into wa­ter. That’s not true: It is en­tirely fea­si­ble to make smart­phones wa­ter­proof de­spite hav­ing a re­mov­able bat­tery. The prin­ci­ple is sim­i­lar to that of rugged out­door phones. A rub­ber gas­ket run­ning around the bat­tery cover, which is pressed into place by screws or a se­cure clip, en­sures that the in­te­rior of the hous­ing is sealed.

It is there­fore quite pos­si­ble that smart­phones will be­come slightly thicker, but sig­nif­i­cant in­creases are un­likely, as de­sign re­mains a key sell­ing point.

Are there any ex­cep­tions to the re­place­ment re­quire­ment?

Yes, but only in spe­cific cases:

Specialized hard­ware: Devices used in highly spe­cial­ized fields (e.g., med­ical di­ag­nos­tics or ex­plo­sion-proof in­dus­trial cell phones) are also ex­empt if a re­place­able bat­tery would com­pro­mise safety.

Extremely long lifes­pan: To avoid the re­place­ment re­quire­ment, a bat­tery would have to be ex­tremely durable. The bat­tery must re­tain at least 80% of its orig­i­nal ca­pac­ity af­ter 1,000 charge cy­cles. That is sig­nif­i­cantly more than many bat­ter­ies on the mar­ket to­day can achieve (often around 500 – 800 cy­cles).

Simultaneous wa­ter pro­tec­tion: In ad­di­tion to dura­bil­ity, the de­vice must be wa­ter- and dust-tight ac­cord­ing to IP67.

Another in­no­va­tion: the “battery pass­port”

In ad­di­tion, the EU is in­tro­duc­ing a dig­i­tal bat­tery pass­port.

Users and re­cy­cling fa­cil­i­ties can ac­cess im­por­tant data via a printed QR code. It stores in­for­ma­tion about the bat­tery’s car­bon foot­print, the pro­por­tion of re­cy­cled ma­te­ri­als, its chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion, and its “state of health.” This rep­re­sents a huge step for­ward, par­tic­u­larly for the sec­ond-hand mar­ket and pro­fes­sional re­cy­clers.

Conclusion

The new EU reg­u­la­tion marks the end of the “disposable” era for smart­phones. Starting in 2027, users will ben­e­fit from longer de­vice lifes­pans, eas­ier re­pairs, and lower costs.

Even though man­u­fac­tur­ers will have to adapt their de­signs to im­prove wa­ter re­sis­tance and aes­thet­ics, the ben­e­fits for the en­vi­ron­ment and con­sumers -including less elec­tronic waste and greater trans­parency — out­weigh these changes.

Contact us for com­pre­hen­sive ad­vice on your com­pli­ance is­sues re­lat­ing to elec­tri­cal and elec­tronic equip­ment, pack­ag­ing, bat­ter­ies, and PV pan­els.

www.ecopv-eu.com/​en/​con­tact/ |  E-Mail: info@ecopv-eu.com

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Bun is great soft­ware.

I use it all the time. It is fast and prac­ti­cal, and the team ships con­stantly. It makes TypeScript a joy to work with in small scripts, apps, tests, and tool­ing. That is why this is frus­trat­ing. I want Bun to win. I want a se­ri­ous Node.js al­ter­na­tive. I want faster in­stalls, faster tests, bet­ter bundling, and less tool­chain bloat.

But I am wor­ried about Bun now.

Anthropic owns Bun

Anthropic ac­quired Bun in December 2025.

The an­nounce­ment said every­thing I wanted to hear: Bun stays open source and MIT-licensed, the same team keeps work­ing on it, and the roadmap keeps fo­cus­ing on high-per­for­mance JavaScript tool­ing and Node.js com­pat­i­bil­ity.

It also said this:

Claude Code ships as a Bun ex­e­cutable to mil­lions of users. If Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks. Anthropic has di­rect in­cen­tive to keep Bun ex­cel­lent.

Claude Code ships as a Bun ex­e­cutable to mil­lions of users. If Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks. Anthropic has di­rect in­cen­tive to keep Bun ex­cel­lent.

In December, that sounded re­as­sur­ing. Anthropic had a huge prod­uct built on Bun. That meant Anthropic had a di­rect in­cen­tive to keep Bun fast, sta­ble, and ex­cel­lent. I still think that ar­gu­ment has merit, but now cracks are show­ing.

Bun is still a great JavaScript run­time, but now it’s in the hands of a com­pany that does­n’t seem to care at all about their soft­ware.

Anthropic mod­els are still great

This is not an “Anthropic bad” post. Well, not en­tirely. I still think Anthropic’s mod­els are great. Claude Opus (4.6 I guess) is still one of the best model fam­i­lies for cod­ing, writ­ing, rea­son­ing, and gen­eral dev work. The model qual­ity is not my con­cern here. My con­cern is the prod­uct layer around the mod­els. Claude Code kind of sucks to use to­day.

Claude Code used to be great

Claude Code felt in­cred­i­ble a year ago. It was one of the first AI cod­ing tools that con­vinced me de­vel­oper work­flows would change from mostly au­to­com­plete to agents. It could read a pro­ject, make fo­cused ed­its, run com­mands, fix mis­takes, and keep go­ing. It felt like a tool built by peo­ple who un­der­stood how devs ac­tu­ally work. Combined with Anthropic’s mod­els, which up un­til re­cently (GPT-5.5) were best-in-class, Claude Code felt un­beat­able.

Though even in December Claude Code was al­ready get­ting worse, it was still good and that made the Bun ac­qui­si­tion make sense to me. If Anthropic was build­ing the fu­ture of cod­ing tools, and Bun was the run­time un­der­neath those tools, maybe Bun had found the best pos­si­ble home. I was al­ways a lit­tle wor­ried about how Bun was go­ing to be­come a sus­tain­able busi­ness given it was VC funded. So the ac­qui­si­tion made sense, and I was op­ti­mistic.

Claude Code is bad

There are so many good cod­ing agents out there right now. Cursor, Augment, Codex, OpenCode, T3 Code, Pi, prob­a­bly more. For a long time Cursor was my main dri­ver, be­cause while Claude Code was get­ting worse over time Cursor (the CLI) was so good at us­ing Anthropic mod­els. Recently, I had to stop us­ing Cursor for rea­sons. I had­n’t used Claude Code in a cou­ple months, so I picked it back up and was ac­tu­ally shocked at how bad it has be­come.

In April 2026, devs started com­plain­ing about Claude Code qual­ity, limit be­hav­ior, third-party har­ness re­stric­tions, con­fus­ing billing, and slow com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Anthropic pub­lished an en­gi­neer­ing post­mortem that blamed prod­uct-layer is­sues, in­clud­ing a re­duced de­fault rea­son­ing ef­fort, a stale-ses­sion bug, and a prompt change that hurt cod­ing qual­ity. I ap­pre­ci­ate the post­mortem. It is bet­ter than pre­tend­ing noth­ing hap­pened. Honestly, it was pos­si­bly the first time Anthropic men­tioned any­thing be­ing their own fault.

Then there was the OpenClaw mess. TechCrunch re­ported that Anthropic told Claude Code sub­scribers they would need to pay ex­tra for OpenClaw and other third-party har­nesses. That is al­ready bad enough. But the weird part came later.

Gigazine cov­ered re­ports that sim­ply hav­ing OpenClaw in git his­tory could cause Claude Code to refuse a re­quest or bill ex­tra. That ar­ti­cle quotes Theo say­ing a re­cent com­mit men­tion­ing OpenClaw in a JSON blob could trig­ger the be­hav­ior, even in an empty repo while call­ing claude -p “hi” di­rectly. If you’re in­ter­ested in watch­ing the clip, it’s in­cred­i­ble.

Theo’s read, and one I find plau­si­ble, is that this looks like a prod­uct where no­body is care­fully dog­food­ing the ac­tual code-level ex­pe­ri­ence be­fore ship­ping changes. Maybe that is un­fair, I don’t know what ac­tu­ally goes on at Anthropic. But from the out­side, Claude Code looks like a tool mov­ing in the wrong di­rec­tion. More re­stric­tions, billing weird­ness, sur­prise be­hav­ior based on text in com­mits.

That is text­book en­shit­ti­fi­ca­tion.

That is why Bun wor­ries me

Bun is em­bed­ded in Claude Code. Claude Code ap­pears to be en­shit­ti­fy­ing. So now I have to worry that Bun could en­shit­tify too. Not be­cause Bun is bad. Bun is not bad. Bun is ex­cel­lent. Not be­cause the Bun team stopped car­ing. I do not be­lieve that.

The prob­lem is as Bun and its team get fur­ther in­te­grated into Anthropic, so will their poli­cies. The same poli­cies that have led to the col­lapse of Claude Code. Will we see is­sues start pop­ping up in Bun that make it seem like the team does­n’t even dog­food their own prod­uct? I don’t know, but I’m not sure I want to con­tinue us­ing it just in case.

I’ll stick with pnpm for now

The up­set­ting thing is Bun pro­vides a lot more than what pnpm of­fers that I end up hav­ing to reach for ad­di­tional de­pen­den­cies to cover. Things like built-in TypeScript sup­port in­stead of need­ing a build step, a bundler in­stead of Vite, test­ing in­stead of vitest. It’s not that the de­pen­den­cies are bad, but get­ting them all wrapped into a sin­gle tool­chain is very nice.

pnpm is not a re­place­ment for Node.js. It is not a re­place­ment for Bun ei­ther. pnpm is just a pack­age man­ager. But for most of my day-to-day work, the part of Bun I reach for most is pack­age man­age­ment. I want in­stalls to be fast. I want monore­pos to work well. I want disk us­age to be sane. Bun gives me that, and so does pnpm.

So for my pro­jects that are cur­rently us­ing Bun, I am mov­ing away from Bun and us­ing pnpm. When some­one asks me what I rec­om­mend for a JavaScript or TypeScript pro­ject to­day, my an­swer is pnpm.

I don’t rec­om­mend mov­ing away from Bun

Even though I per­son­ally am mov­ing some pro­jects away from Bun, don’t take my ad­vice as gospel. I’m just some guy on the in­ter­net. You should de­cide what is best for you. For new pro­jects, pnpm makes sense. For ex­ist­ing pro­jects, you might want to stick with Bun un­less and un­til you have a good rea­son to leave.

I hope I am wrong

I hope Bun stays great. I hope the Bun team keeps ship­ping ex­cel­lent work. I hope Anthropic gives them room to make the right calls for the JavaScript ecosys­tem. Bun can still come out of this stronger. Anthropic has money, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and a real rea­son to care about Bun’s per­for­mance and sta­bil­ity. But I do not trust the sit­u­a­tion as much as I did in December. Claude Code used to feel like proof that Anthropic un­der­stood dev tools. Now it feels like a warn­ing that Anthropic does­n’t know what it takes to main­tain and im­prove a prod­uct over time.

Bun is still great. I just do not know where it goes from here. A year from now things could be com­pletely dif­fer­ent, so I will fol­low-up and see if my pre­dic­tion is right.

In Brief

Posted:

7:30 AM PDT · May 4, 2026

Almost all of the 20 U.S. state gov­ern­ment-run health in­sur­ance mar­ket­places shared res­i­dents’ ap­pli­ca­tion in­for­ma­tion with ad­ver­tis­ing and tech gi­ants, in­clud­ing Google, LinkedIn, Meta, and Snap, ac­cord­ing to a new in­ves­ti­ga­tion by Bloomberg.

The re­port dri­ves home the pri­vacy prob­lems cre­ated by pixel-sized track­ers, which al­low web­site own­ers to col­lect in­for­ma­tion about their vis­i­tors, of­ten for web an­a­lyt­ics and iden­ti­fy­ing bugs. A com­mon tool in dig­i­tal ad­ver­tis­ing, these track­ers also al­low the col­lec­tion of per­sonal in­for­ma­tion if mis­con­fig­ured and placed on web­sites that con­tain sen­si­tive con­tent, such as health­care data.

Per Bloomberg, New York’s health in­sur­ance ex­change shared in­for­ma­tion with sev­eral tech com­pa­nies about a per­son’s ap­pli­ca­tion, in­clud­ing whether they pro­vided de­tails about whether they have in­car­cer­ated fam­ily mem­bers.

The health in­sur­ance ex­change for Washington, D.C. also asked res­i­dents about the per­son’s sex and race, which TikTok’s pixel tracker at­tempted to redact. Some races were masked and oth­ers were not, the pub­li­ca­tion re­ported. A spokesper­son for the Washington, D.C. ex­change told Bloomberg that res­i­dents’ email ad­dress, phone num­ber, and coun­try iden­ti­fiers were also shared with TikTok.

Washington, D.C. paused its roll­out of the TikTok tracker, and Virginia re­moved the Meta tracker from its web­site af­ter Bloomberg found it was shar­ing res­i­dents’ ZIP codes with the tech gi­ant.

This is not a new prob­lem, and has pre­vi­ously caught out tele­health star­tups and health­care gi­ants alike. Several com­pa­nies and health­care gi­ants have had to no­tify mil­lions that they in­ad­ver­tently col­lected and shared their health in­for­ma­tion with tech gi­ants, whose prof­its are de­rived from us­ing con­sumer data for ad­ver­tis­ing.

But Bloomberg’s in­ves­ti­ga­tion shows that these pixel track­ers can af­fect large swathes of the pop­u­la­tion when placed on gov­ern­ment web­sites. The pub­li­ca­tion noted that more than seven mil­lion Americans pur­chased health in­sur­ance for this year through a state health in­sur­ance ex­change.

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Speaking of com­pa­nies with valu­able mi­nor­ity stakes in AI com­pa­nies, there’s one thing that stuck in my craw about the block­buster Ronan Farrow / Andrew Marantz in­ves­tiga­tive piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month for The New Yorker. It did­n’t come up dur­ing Nilay Patel’s ex­cel­lent in­ter­view with Farrow on Decoder, ei­ther.

Sam Altman was the pres­i­dent of Y Combinator for sev­eral years, and left to be­come the full-time CEO of OpenAI. The New Yorker quotes Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham mul­ti­ple times, in the con­text of Altman’s trust­wor­thi­ness. (Some of those quotes are first­hand, oth­ers sec­ond­hand.) Graham’s role in the story — par­tic­u­larly his pub­lic re­marks af­ter pub­li­ca­tion — com­prised an en­tire sec­tion in my own take on the New Yorker piece, wherein I con­cluded:

I would char­ac­ter­ize Graham’s tweets re: Altman this week as

em­pha­siz­ing only that Altman was not fired or oth­er­wise forced

from YC, and could have stayed as CEO at YC if he’d found an­other

CEO for OpenAI. But for all of Graham’s elu­ci­dat­ing en­gage­ment on

Twitter/X this week re­gard­ing this story, he’s danc­ing around the

core ques­tion of the Farrow/Marantz in­ves­ti­ga­tion, the one right

there in The New Yorker’s head­line: Can Sam Altman be trusted?

“We did­n’t ‘remove’ Sam Altman” and “We did­n’t want him to

leave” are not the same things as say­ing, say, “I think Sam

Altman is hon­est and trust­wor­thy” or “Sam Altman is a man of

in­tegrity”. If Paul Graham were to say such things, clearly and

un­am­bigu­ously, those re­marks would carry tremen­dous weight. But — rather con­spic­u­ously to my eyes — he’s not say­ing such things.

I would char­ac­ter­ize Graham’s tweets re: Altman this week as

em­pha­siz­ing only that Altman was not fired or oth­er­wise forced

from YC, and could have stayed as CEO at YC if he’d found an­other

CEO for OpenAI. But for all of Graham’s elu­ci­dat­ing en­gage­ment on

Twitter/X this week re­gard­ing this story, he’s danc­ing around the

core ques­tion of the Farrow/Marantz in­ves­ti­ga­tion, the one right

there in The New Yorker’s head­line: Can Sam Altman be trusted?

“We did­n’t ‘remove’ Sam Altman” and “We did­n’t want him to

leave” are not the same things as say­ing, say, “I think Sam

Altman is hon­est and trust­wor­thy” or “Sam Altman is a man of

in­tegrity”. If Paul Graham were to say such things, clearly and

un­am­bigu­ously, those re­marks would carry tremen­dous weight. But — rather con­spic­u­ously to my eyes — he’s not say­ing such things.

The thing that stuck in my craw is this: Does Y Combinator own a stake in OpenAI? And if they do, given OpenAI’s sky-high val­u­a­tion, is­n’t that stake worth bil­lions of dol­lars?

OpenAI was seeded by an off­shoot of Y Combinator called YC Research in 2016 — when Altman was run­ning YC. In December 2023, the well-known AI ex­pert (and AI-hype skep­tic) Gary Marcus wrote the fol­low­ing, in a piece on Altman’s trust­wor­thi­ness in the wake of the OpenAI board saga that saw Altman fired, re-hired, and the board purged in the course of a tu­mul­tuous week:

After pok­ing around, I found out that “I have no eq­uity in OpenAI”

was only half the truth; while Altman to my knowl­edge holds no

di­rect eq­uity in OpenAI, he does have an in­di­rect stake in

OpenAI, and that fact should have been dis­closed.

In par­tic­u­lar, he own a stake of Y Combinator, and Y Combinator

owns a stake in OpenAI. It may well be worth tens of mil­lions of

dol­lars; even for Altman, that’s not triv­ial. Since he was

President of Y Combinator, and CEO of OpenAI; he surely was

aware of this.

After pok­ing around, I found out that “I have no eq­uity in OpenAI”

was only half the truth; while Altman to my knowl­edge holds no

di­rect eq­uity in OpenAI, he does have an in­di­rect stake in

OpenAI, and that fact should have been dis­closed.

In par­tic­u­lar, he own a stake of Y Combinator, and Y Combinator

owns a stake in OpenAI. It may well be worth tens of mil­lions of

dol­lars; even for Altman, that’s not triv­ial. Since he was

President of Y Combinator, and CEO of OpenAI; he surely was

aware of this.

So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like dev­il­ishly dif­fi­cult in­for­ma­tion to ob­tain. I asked around and a lit­tle birdie who knows sev­eral OpenAI in­vestors came back with an an­swer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 per­cent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s cur­rent $852 bil­lion val­u­a­tion, that’s worth over $5 bil­lion.

Graham and his wife Jessica Livingston are two of Y Combinator’s four found­ing part­ners. The fact that Paul Graham per­son­ally has bil­lions of dol­lars at stake with OpenAI does­n’t mean that his pub­lic opin­ion on Sam Altman’s trust­wor­thi­ness and lead­er­ship is in­valid. But it cer­tainly seems like the sort of thing that ought to be dis­closed when quot­ing Graham as an Altman char­ac­ter ref­er­ence. A bil­lion dol­lars here, a bil­lion there — that adds up to the sort of money that might skew a fel­low’s opin­ion.

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Research

Working Papers

Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline?…

Working Paper 35117

DOI 10.3386/w35117

Issue Date April 2026

With large gains in life ex­pectancy, the pop­u­la­tion share of dis­abil­ity due to cog­ni­tive de­cline and de­men­tia has sub­stan­tially in­creased. Many older adults in the United States leave the work­force well be­fore age 65. Correlational ev­i­dence sug­gests that leav­ing the work­force be­fore re­tire­ment age could ac­cel­er­ate the pace of cog­ni­tive de­cline. We of­fer causal ev­i­dence, us­ing HRS data for the United States, ex­ploit­ing plau­si­bly ex­oge­nous shifts in la­bor de­mand in lo­cal la­bor mar­kets as a Bartik in­stru­ment for em­ploy­ment vari­a­tion across these mar­kets. We find sub­stan­tial de­clines over time in cog­ni­tive scores stem­ming from neg­a­tive la­bor de­mand shocks. These find­ings are con­cen­trated among men aged 51 to 64, whose em­ploy­ment de­ci­sions and out­comes may be more sen­si­tive to lo­cal la­bor mar­ket con­di­tions than are these de­ci­sions or out­comes for women or for older men. Our ev­i­dence ex­tends past work fo­cus­ing nar­rowly on the re­tire­ment age win­dow and pro­vides fur­ther sup­port to the no­tion that work­ing to older ages may de­lay age-re­lated cog­ni­tive de­cline.

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Noah Arman Kouchekinia, David Neumark, and Tim A. Bruckner, “Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks,” NBER Working Paper 35117 (2026), https://​doi.org/​10.3386/​w35117.

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Copy Citation

Noah Arman Kouchekinia, David Neumark, and Tim A. Bruckner, “Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks,” NBER Working Paper 35117 (2026), https://​doi.org/​10.3386/​w35117.

Download Citation

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