Sometimes she'll also misinterpret commands for unclear reasons. "Tomorrow at 7am, remind me to call John" and she responds "Ok, I've turned on your 7am alarm". I try again, speaking more clearly, and she says "Your 7am alarm is already on"

Looking at the stoners I knew in college, you'd think that pot was a pretty destructive drug. But now, working with successful professionals who buy dispensary weed on the weekends, it seems like harmless fun. Besides any class stuff going on there, I think that hanging out with people who want to do bong rips and zone out on the couch leads you to a different relationship with THC than having friends who will look down at you if you get too high to hold a conversation.

A Peruvian friend told me that their mother served coca leaf tea to the family on a regular basis. It was traditional, it wasn't treated any differently than we'd treat coffee, and it hadn't led anyone in her extended family to seek out more refined versions.

So how would cocaine legalization look in America? Would coca tea go on the menu at Starbucks? Would people stop there, the same way that lots of folks drink a pot of coffee a day but relatively fewer take caffeine pills? Probably not, that's not how we do things here. Without regulation, bodegas would be selling single-serve bumps in little tear-open packages with Scarface on the label. We will sell you as much "here, go destroy your life" as we can.

Up to a point, regulation can tamp down the market for cheaper and more powerful intoxicants (like, alcohol prohibition was hopeless but cities can successfully prevent malt liquor and everclear sales if they think that cuts down on alcohol-related deaths) But I think that attempting to shape the culture of consumption around a drug is probably a better long term strategy than full prohibition.

I think what finally killed their search quality is the fact that there's no longer a public human-curated network of websites to draw meaning from. Most content on the web is bulk-generated crap, personal blogs and websites are rare, and many passionate hobbyist communities are hidden from crawlers in places like closed Facebook groups.

The app is a mix of minigames and interactive tutorials. I moved through them quickly because they're all bite-sized enough to do in spare minutes while waiting in line etc. The tutorials are short, single topic, interactive lessons that introduce a concept, give an example from tournament play, and sometimes quiz you about what the next move should be.

The minigames seemed dumb at first, (and I still hate Dream Escape) but after playing them a few times in order to continue advancing through the lessons I came to see them as well designed "wax on, wax off" style drills. 'Poker Face', looks like a memory game but it's actually teaching you to quickly evaluate which player would benefit more from exchanging pieces. Beach Bounty helps you instantly visualize where a piece could be n moves in the future. Flight Control, where you try to quickly tap the appropriate square when shown the coordinates in standard chess notation, seemed pointless until I tried reading books about chess and found the notation slowing me down. Once I'd drilled the coordinates enough that they were second nature, I could visualize them as I read instead of constantly referring to a diagram and counting the squares.

In my lay opinion, Magnus Trainer is a brilliant bit of educational technology. It's not teaching you anything you couldn't learn elsewhere, but it felt easy and fun to me. If I hadn't stumbled across it I don't think I ever would have delved as deeply into chess as I did.