first, links

I have so many things to say! I'll start with "here are a lot of links" because that's easier.

Trying to at least kinda hold car companies accountable for their totally nonsense predictions about how fast they'd have autonomous cars.

Newsletters are the new thing it seems, maybe because of the dark forest the internet has become, and some of them are really good.
Normcore Tech comes to mind. This post about Reddit is pretty right on - Reddit has become a great place for a lot of weird niche things, but there's no sign it's not gonna go the way of Facebook or Twitter. This post and this post about Facebook.
The Margins seems good too, though I haven't read it as long.

"It's so much more than cooking." Yes! "my husband... had focused on the one thing he'd promised to do: grab a pot and a pan, put something in it, and make edible food. But what I'd wanted him to do was much more complex, so ingrained in my experience of cooking that I didn't even think to articulate it. I wanted him to pick up the baton. To check what ingredients we already had, and what might need using up. To plan out a meal that would meet everyone's dietary needs and preferences (including a balanced amount of protein and starch, and at least one vegetable). I wanted him to look up recipes, and make a grocery list if needed, and stop by the store on the way home."
(I mean, I'm usually pretty good at this kind of logistics stuff - but it is certainly a lot of mental overhead!)
(and, in before your "smart refrigerator" - this is the kind of thing that is too multifaceted and messy to be Solved By Technology for a long time, I think.)

Technological development in every direction is not inevitable. "Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. ... Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered."