What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most
two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest
day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing
else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the
most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
Many AI researchers are overly focused on risks from model misalignment, and will be in for a rough surprise when havoc arises from other layers of the stack.
Lastly, the duration of a clinical trial does not merely determine how fast an individual therapy reaches patients. It also shapes which diseases attract serious investment and which do not.
Trials serve two distinct functions: validation — confirming whether a drug works and is safe — and learning, or generating biological data to refine our understanding of a disease, a compound, and the relationship between the two.
Being a great listener when people speak. Deep insights about understanding, connection, helping people express themselves, overcoming assumptions, the ethics of gossip, and more. Specific techniques for the support response, encouraging elaboration, and keeping it balanced. You can’t be ethical without being a good listener. When people say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “…
At Anthropic, we don't build for the model of today, we build for the model of six months from now. And that's still my advice to founders that are building on LLMs.
History has shown very extensively that, left to their own devices, even if something could be done safely, people in a hurry will find all sorts of ways to f*** things up.
I think frontier AI auditing (covering both safety and security) is both urgently needed and doable, and can help avoid extreme concentration of power, since it introduces external oversight into the decision-making of people with a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" at their disposal.
We need to accept that at best, we will just barely avoid some of the worst case scenarios (e.g., an AI-enabled biological weapon that kills billions, a rogue AI takeover, or stable global totalitarianism enabled by AI), given the current pace of AI capabilities relative to the pace of governance.
I think everyone’s starting point for investing should be to know and be in the portfolio that is best to have, independent of any tactical views of the markets.
If you want my advice about how to do these things well to help you be successful at investing, I recommend the Dalio Market Principles course which is put out by the Wealth Management Institute of Singapore.
Extrapolators have a remarkable track record in the AI field, being repeatedly early to trends and capabilities that empiricists believed were still decades away.
I initially assumed this was a temporary divide. New users tend to watch closely and check the system's progress, but as trust builds, that scrutiny fades and monitoring starts to feel like a chore. Yet it still seems like there's two camps (for now).
Like any addictive consumer product that routinely exposes users to graphic sex, extreme violence, and anonymous sexual predators, social media in its current form causes a variety of harms to people of all ages. But we allow adults (often defined as age 18) to make decisions that are bad for them.
I cannot support any law that includes a “parental consent” exception—it defeats the central purpose of the law by dropping parents and children straight back into the same collective-action trap
Sixteen is also roughly the age by which a majority of adolescents have completed puberty: a sensitive period of neural reorganization during which it is extremely important to protect the brain.
It's interesting that the Shorter hobby businesses all draft off superstars in the legacy hobby, but make their vast majority of their money from people who will of course never come close to the level superstars - you'd still go to pickleball and talk Nadal vs Federer, you'd still go to Top Golf and make Tiger Woods jokes.
And that risks giving the impression that basic constitutional rights and restraints on police and executive power that date back to the Founding are, actually, negotiable.
Yes, I could totally see how OpenClaw could become a huge company. And no, it’s not really exciting for me. I’m a builder at heart. I did the whole creating-a-company game already, poured 13 years of my life into it and learned a lot. What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.
My one little bit, the one little bit of of fundamental uncertainty even on long time scales is this thing about tasks that aren't verifiable. Like, planning a mission to Mars, like, uh you know, doing some fundamental scientific discovery like like CRISPR, like, you know, writing a writing a novel. Hard to hard to verify those tasks.
on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.
the goal is not to teach the model every possible skill within RL just as we don't do that within pre-training, right? Within pre-training, we're not trying to expose the model to, you know, every every possible you know, way that words could be put together, right? You know, we're it's it's rather that the model trains on a lot of things and then and then it reaches generalization across pre-training, right?
I think there's something going on that pre-training it's it's not like the process of humans learning. It's somewhere between the process of humans learning and the process of human evolution.
I will tell you though what the most surprising thing has been. The most surprising thing has been the lack of public recognition of how close we are to the end of the exponential.
But the quality of these systems isn't just in the code they write. It's also in the code I don't have to write. And maybe more importantly, their actual value is in the code I would never have written, or could never have written, or never would have wanted to write.
So, I feel we, as a society, we need some catching up to do in terms of understanding that AI is incredibly powerful, but it's not always right. It's not, it's not all-powerful, you know?
But I don't want to, like, pull that down because every time someone made the first pull request is a win for our society, you know? Like, it… Like, it doesn't matter how, how shitty it is, y- you gotta start somewhere.
If you get really good at coding that means you have to be really good at general purpose problem solving. So that's a skill, right? And that just maps into other domains.
Long lead times and soft costs, fueled by the world-leading US wages for "white collar" work, are the root cause of poor performance in low-volume production because there are few units to spread the soft costs over.
there’s also within that excitement, and within everybody talking just to each other, there’s a dismissal of the basic human experience across the United States and the Midwest, across the world.
there’s like a line to walk between being seriously concerned, but not fearmongering because fearmongering destroys the possibility of creating something special with a thing.
It’s actually how good they are at programming is almost a burden in their ability to empathize with the system that’s starting from scratch. It’s a totally new paradigm of, like, how to program. You really, really have to empathize.
my criticism of MoltBook is that I believe a lot of the stuff that was screenshotted is human prompted. Which, just look at the incentive of how the whole thing was used. It’s obvious to me at least that a lot of it was humans prompting the thing so they can then screenshot it and post it on X in order to go viral.
We show that equilibrium generically occurs at neither the Harberger nor Glaeser-Luttmer benchmark. Cost-minimizing suppliers drive allocations to vertices, not interiors. Corners are not an assumption but an outcome about what cost-minimizing suppliers choose. The correct benchmark is corners, not random, and corners generate qualitatively different welfare properties: losses far larger than either efficient or random distributions, and discontinuous jumps from small parameter perturbations.
These corner allocations create a distinct source of cross-market misallocation, separate from the aggregate quantity loss (the Harberger triangle) and from within-market misallocation emphasized in prior work.
Over thirteen lessons, you’ll learn about the past, present, and future of meat, from the ways animals and humans are treated in meat processing plants to emerging meat alternatives.
filmmakers Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo reunite with investigative authors Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser to take a fresh look at our efficient yet vulnerable food system.
Furthermore, I believe it’s very unlikely that space-based manufacturing or mining could be lucrative enough to fund the venture.
Their words now
Today, exploding demand for power-intensive AI applications provides enough of an upside to justify producing components in space, providing the economic engine necessary to justify and fund the trillions of dollars necessary to build and sustain space factories.
The economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
building a third-party client to read and route messages is a gray area in their terms of service, and perhaps only partially supported in their API surfaces.
The "homework problem" described above might be much worse in practice for end users who aren't motivated to invest in their email triage systems, even if it will save them time in the medium term.
If you’re interested in the environmental impacts of our current food system and want to dig into the opportunities for meat-like products without the animals (and their impacts), I really recommend it.
Tariffs, and especially the erratic implementation of them, are teaching our allies and enemies alike that the US is no longer a reliable trading partner.
I think that there will be lots of work for us cleaning up after the slop, but if you know what you're doing AI augmented development is going to get you some amazing results
I've realized that performance engineering as we know it may not be enough - I'm thinking of new engineering methods so that we can find bigger optimizations than we have before, and find them faster.
The staggering and fast-growing cost of AI datacenters is a call for performance engineering like no other in history; it's not just about saving costs - it's about saving the planet.
Immediately cease trying to perform meaningful work via a chatbot (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini on the web, etc.). Chatbots have real value and are a daily part of my AI workflow, but their utility in coding is highly limited because you're mostly hoping they come up with the right results based on their prior training, and correcting them involves a human (you) to tell them they're wrong repeatedly.
I particularly like to combine this with slower, more thoughtful models like Amp's deep mode (which is basically just GPT-5.2-Codex) which can take upwards of 30+ minutes to make small changes. The flip side of that is that it does tend to produce very good results.
As high-level programming cedes way to the prose compiler, making your goals and specs well understood to the ambiguity loop and showing good judgment is going to matter more than ever.
The Moonlight client is available for virtually every platform: Mac, iOS, Android, and of course Linux. That means no need to dual boot to enjoy the best games at the highest fidelity.
This is what it means to read a short story collection from an absolute master at the absolute peak of his powers. He can slide you frictionlessly between Icelandic troll tragedies to lethal drone-leopard romantic agonies to battles of the gods and the cigar box that has the universe inside of it. All with the lyricism of Bradbury, the madcap wit of Sturgeon, the unrelenting weirdness of Dick, the heart of Tiptree and the precision of Chiang.
Which brings me to the film adaptation of Inherent Vice, that widely-disliked, subtly-championed shaggy stoner LA noir that confused critics and rankled fans and also happens to be the best movie Paul Thomas Anderson has ever made.
If I was put on the spot to name the greatest movie of the 21st century, I would probably say Michael Hanneke's Amour, an achingly moving, relentlessly unpleasant portrait of an elderly couple sinking into illness and senescence, forced into making the grimmest decisions possible.
The Coens are typically considered to be at their best when they're cruel diagnosticians of American life - see their portentous, overstuffed, painfully self-impressed No Country for Old Men
but ice sort of forms through a process of random nucleation and then extension. And this is cool because you can uh modulate the like sort of nucleation the rate of nucleation and extension to then modulate the probability of ice formation.
but I think that the thing that a lot of people will face is just like this question of like is it worth you know traveling so far to give up my current social context and that will put a limit on like how much people want to use this for
But right now like there's no way to press pause on their biological time. So like what if you had an ambulance of the future, right? Like what if you could take someone who is on their deathbed and um you know find some way to you know just sort of hibernate them basically until um the sort of critical cure for their disease comes online.
I think longevity and aging kind of occupy this weird realm where because they're not like explicitly diseases in a way that's fully socially recognized yet they're not seen as valid to work on but like that's not really for I think technical reasons on some level it's more for like classification reasons
What you want to do is say what made you cancel? In other words, what about the product or situation or whatever caused the cancellation? Just phrasing it that way, you get much better results.
So let's suppose you add 100 customers a month and you have 5% cancellation. So 100 divided by 5% is 2,000. So a company like that will never have more than 2,000 customers.
Marketing grows only as fast as you can improve marketing. We all know that's quite hard actually. It's linear. It's hard to find new channels that aren't trivial. Like, it's hard. Of course, we're going to do it, but like it it's hard. Whereas, cancellations grow automatically as you grow, right? So, cancellations always overtake marketing for this reason.
They actually had the budget and bought the stupid thing. Then they went through onboarding and invested their time etc etc. That is a crazy gauntlet that almost no one gets through.
there's a there's a series of of questions that I ask to to diagnose why is growth slowing in this order because it's one of these things where the first one that's a problem, if you don't fix that, it doesn't matter if you fix one of the ones below.
I only checked a handful of youtube reviewers, but my favorite is Jennifer Wang, who seemed properly autistic about clothing quality and understanding that there are multiple places on the pareto frontier one might choose to occupy
The ORS is a brief, 4-item measure designed to assess areas of life functioning known to change as a result of therapeutic intervention. It takes less than one minute to complete and score.
The SRS is a brief, 4-item measure designed to assess the therapeutic alliance. It provides immediate feedback on the quality of the relationship and allows for course correction in real time.
But the goal we need to achieve is so much easier: we just need to build a model that’s as good as us at alignment research, and that we trust more than ourselves to do this research well because it’s sufficiently aligned.
Back when the Fourth Amendment was enacted, the most fundamental remedy for an unlawful government entry into your home was a civil suit for trespass against the officers.
Even if the policy is unconstitutional, as it seems to be, a person who is illegally searched probably can't sue ICE for violating their constitutional rights.
Given the focus in Coolidge, Shadwick, and Payton on the fundamental role of warrants in inserting a judicial check on the executive, it seems out of place to say that this can be satisfied by the executive checking itself.
After spending years working on health, lowering your resting heart rate (RHR) before bed is the single most effective thing you can do for your health.
If you have Bruxism, I strongly encourage you to address it. A dentist on Blueprint recommended the SomnoDent Bruxism Device , and for the first time in my life, my Bruxism has stopped.
Use red and amber lights in the evening . Bluelight is bad for sleep. You can get blue light blocking apps (f.lux), glasses and also turn red mode on your phone.
Canonical’s LXD works out-of-the-box on Ubuntu, and is a great way to sandbox an agent into a disposable environment where the blast radius is limited should the agent make a mistake.
But with today's AI coding agents, building software is remarkably easy. So instead of handing over static assets and static guidelines, designers can deliver custom software. Tools that let clients create their own on-brand assets whenever they need them.
Given the simplicity and speed of the algorithms in this post and the increasingly small deltas between successive algorithms, perhaps we are nearing an optimal solution.
My daily drivers now include Amp, Cursor, and Claude Code. I still enjoy notebooks, but only for data analysis, machine learning, or other exploratory workflows where the iterative, visual nature of notebooks shines.
My daily drivers now include Amp, Cursor, and Claude Code. I still enjoy notebooks, but only for data analysis, machine learning, or other exploratory workflows where the iterative, visual nature of notebooks shines.
Scrutiny applied to AI is way below other technologies that - even if you totally ignore the doomers - could put far fewer lives at risk than AI in a single incident.
In short, whether AI is a normal technology or an unusually dangerous one, it doesn't make sense for companies to check their own homework on safety and security.
Компьютеры стали бытовым прибором, начать программировать легче, чем когда-либо, сложнейшие вещи делаются просто и даже тривиально, написаны горы готового кода. К сожалению, у этого есть и обратная сторона - программы становятся большими, медленными, неуправляемыми, непонимаемыми.
Local-first is not going to win, but that's okay We'll explore the complexities of traditional stack (db-server-frontend), develop a theory of software evolution: which systems succeed and why.
When applications can generate capabilities on demand, the definition of "what this product does" becomes more fluid. Features aren't just what shipped in the last release, they're also what users will ask for in the next session.
Big flat toggle buttons under satisfying tension. Clear affordances. You push them down, not in. One click catches, one doesn't. You can use them with bare hands, oven mitts, fingers coated in slippery whatever. Doesn't matter. Plenty of surface area. Outstanding design. It's all been downhill from there.
I also read critic Michael Dirda's On Conan Doyle, a lovely short book I'd never heard of that I spotted on the shelf at the library — hooray for the serendipity of the stacks!
This book has more of a DGAF tone than Hold Still, I think, and it works best for me when Mann is telling stories instead of trying to extract a lesson for the reader.
The Academy Is…, one of my favorite bands from this century (and yes, I feel old just typing that out), has recorded their first new album in eighteen years, titled Almost There, and will be putting it out in March.
The main reasons for males suffering from a higher burden of global TB cases, compared to females, may be in large part due to population-scale factors, such as employment type, the quantity and type of social contacts they make, and their health-seeking behaviours (e.g. differences in diagnostic and treatment delays between genders).
When someone is asked to reflect on their own life, they draw on a wide range of experiences. When people are asked about “the world”, they recall a very small number of recent events (the availability bias).
The guaranteed path to success used to be go to school, follow the rules, get a job, buy a house. That worked for most people who did it. That path is gone now.
Over the past three decades, scholars have identified a massive, unexplained gap in the timeline between the first domestication of crops and the emergence of the first agrarian states, complicating the narrative popularized by authors like Harari and Diamond.
I don’t think this is very productive (expert users of a piece of software are notoriously bad at being able to tell if an explanation will be clear to non-experts), so I needed to find a way to identify problems with the man pages that was a little more evidence-based.
if it walks like a checking account, quacks like a checking account, and is marketed as an alternative to checking accounts, then it is almost certainly within Reg E scope
A product manager will be called upon to make scores of decisions every day. In none of these cases will you have all of the information you want, and you’ll rarely be 100% confident. Poker champion turned decision researcher Annie Duke will help you learn how to be comfortable with uncertainty.
When does our animal brain make decisions for us before our more analytical brain has a chance to think through the consequences? From Nobel laureate Kahneman, this is one of the most important psychology books ever written.
The third book in Cagan’s trilogy, this one focuses on how companies can transform their cultures from project- to product-oriented. This book is probably less useful for the individual contributor, but it offers hope for anyone trapped in a feature team that something better is possible. Buy it for your boss or CEO.
Laszlo and his team at Google reinvented the role of human resources. This book is a terrific overview of what makes Google Google, from culture, to hiring, to making decisions.
Jazz is messy, and musicians seem to court disaster night after night. What can product leaders learn from how these artists approach their art? Barrett’s entertaining book formed the backbone for
The internet is unique in the history of technology because there’s a list of things it improved (communication, access to information) but another list of things it likely made worse for almost everybody
Nicolas Niarchos, The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth is a good treatment of minerals issues as they relate to the Congo today.
John Boyer’s Austria 1867-1955 offers parts of the answer, though not in a conceptually organized way. It’s a work of history written for specialists, which means that the narrative serves the footnotes rather than the other way around.
1913: The Year Before the Storm presents a whimsical slice of Central Europe. Art historian Florian Illies collates fragments of leading figures month by month, diary-entry style.
Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear also has an experimental form. Da is a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins who emigrated from Hangzhou before she was 7.
There is something deeply satisfying with reading out loud phrases like: “for in mere breath did it come, and into darkness it goes, and in darkness its name is covered.” Though King James is iconic, Robert Alter better conveys overall the literary power of the Hebrew Bible.
a lot of old school GTM leaders are like, you know, AI isn't going to hurt sales reps. It's just going to make them give them superpowers. The best ones, yes, the mediocre are just going to be like more mediocre, right?
So, so many of these GTM books are playbooks, especially folks selling courses and stuff, but they're playbooks. Run from the playbooks. Embrace the plays.
And so many behaviors are like that. It's like, well, did you want it or not? You know, like in the one sense, you wanted it so bad that you would check it every 3 minutes when it was next to you, but in another sense, you never wanted it bad enough that you would work for 30 seconds and walk down the hall to get it. And so, a little bit of friction can sometimes go a long way in shaping a behavior.
You want to you want to be able to walk into the rooms that you're in each day, and the good habit is the path of least resistance. It's the easiest thing to do. And a lot of the time you walk into rooms and it's the distractions that are easier to do and you feel like you're swimming upstream and trying to fight your environment to make a change happen.
there's also a flip side to this or a dark side, a shadow side to identity, which is the tighter you cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. And so once you have started to identify as a certain type of person, once you adopt that label, oh, I am a member of this group or I am the type of person who believes this thing, it becomes hard to stretch and grow outside of that.
behavior and belief is like two-way street. You know, what you believe will influence the actions that you take, but the actions that you take can also influence what you believe about yourself. And you know, every time you show up and do it in some small way, you prove to yourself a little bit, hey, maybe I am that kind of person. And so, my encouragement, my suggestion is to let the behavior lead the way.
So one of the core lessons of atomic habits is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So, when you show up at the gym today, you are casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. When you sit down and make one sales call, you are casting a vote for being a salesperson. When you write one sentence, you are casting a vote for being a writer. And no, doing one push-up does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for that identity.
As with self driving cars, most of the early players in humanoid robots, will quietly shut up shop and disappear. Those that remain will pivot and redefine what they are doing, without renaming it, to something more achievable and with, finally, plausible business cases.
Tesla (owned by Tesla) has put on a facade of being operational, but it is not operational in the sense of the other two services, and faces regulatory headwinds that both Waymo and Zoox have long been able to satisfy. They are not on a path to becoming a real service.
Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations to make a business case for their adoption and therefore their time horizon to scaling across geographies.
A decade on, it already feels possible that in the future, commentators will argue that this specific fruitful synthesis lit the fuse on evolutionary cultural anthropology’s explosion (with due apologies to earlier books from L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, E. O. Wilson, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd).
Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.
I didn't read much non-fiction this year, but the best of what I did read was Zeke Faux's Number Go Up about the cryptocurrency bubble. This book will not change anyone's mind, but it's a readable and entertaining summary of some of the more obvious cryptocurrency scams. I also had enough quibbles with it to write an extended review, which is a compliment of sorts.
The best book I read this year was also the last book I reviewed (and yes, I snuck the review under the wire for that reason): Bethany Jacobs's This Brutal Moon, the conclusion of the Kindom Trilogy that started with These Burning Stars. I thought the first two books of the series were interesting but flawed, but the conclusion blew me away and improved the entire trilogy in retrospect. Like all books I rate 10 out of 10, I'm sure a large part of my reaction is idiosyncratic, but two friends of mine also loved the conclusion so it's not just me.
The stand-out non-fiction book of the year was Rory Stewart's Politics on the Edge. I have a lot of disagreements with Stewart's political positions (the more I listen to him, the more disagreements I find), but he is an excellent memoirist who skewers the banality, superficiality, and contempt for competence that has become so prevailing in centrist and right-wing politics. It's hard not to read this book and despair of electoralism and the current structures of governments, but it's bracing to know that even some people I disagree with believe in the value of expertise.
I also finished Suzanne Palmer's excellent Finder Chronicles series, reading The Scavenger Door and Ghostdrift. This series is some of the best science fiction I've read in a long time and I'm sad it is over (at least for now).
I also finished Suzanne Palmer's excellent Finder Chronicles series, reading The Scavenger Door and Ghostdrift. This series is some of the best science fiction I've read in a long time and I'm sad it is over (at least for now).
The reason I think MCP may be a one-year wonder is the stratospheric growth of coding agents. It appears that the best possible tool for any situation is Bash—if your agent can run arbitrary shell commands, it can do anything that can be done by typing commands into a terminal.
I use a FlexiSpot adjustable / motorized standing desk standing desk and stand about 90% of the time. Been doing this for about a decade. I liked it so much that I have 2 of them
My go-to languages are TypeScript for web stuff, Go for CLIs and Swift if it needs to use macOS stuff or has UI. Go wasn’t something I gave even the slightest thought even a few months ago, but eventually I played around and found that agents are really great at writing it, and its simple type system makes linting fast.
Swift’s build infra is good enough for most things these days. codex knows how to run iOS apps and how to deal with the Simulator. No special stuff or MCPs needed.
This amazing book traces the development of genetic engineering, and how Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson turned the science into a commercial product by developing recombinant insulin.
I mistakenly expected this to be a somewhat shallow, generic popular science book, but it was a very thorough account of how CRISPR gene editing emerged from decades of obscure basic research into bacterial immune systems.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach is a beautiful fable about a seagull who wants to fly for the pure joy of flight, rather than simply to find food, as most gulls do. Ostracized from his flock for his eccentric behavior, Jonathan embarks on a quest for aerodynamic perfection that doubles as a moving spiritual allegory. You've never read a book quite like this one before, and it'll stick with you long after you reach the end.
Breakneck by Dan Wang takes you on a fascinating journey through China's engineering state, juxtaposing it against America's lawyerly society in an effort to reveal what each country should learn from the other. I've been a keen reader of Dan's personal blog for many years and am delighted to report that this book, his first, features everything I love most about his writing: his unbounded curiosity, thoughtful analysis, compelling storytelling, self-awareness, offbeat sense of humor, and insights born of lived experience.
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is a surprisingly weird and weirdly underrated novel given how many copies it sold and the popularity of the blockbuster franchise it spawned. The story weaves together many apparently disparate threads and there are extensive speculative digressions into the biotechnology, business interests, and institutional dynamics that make the park possible and its dissolution inevitable. If the movie is supremely entertaining, the book is supremely thought-provoking.
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm is a mind-bending psychological thriller about a secret agency tasked with fighting dangerous "antimemes"—ideas that refuse to be remembered. Plenty of stories start with a clever high-concept premise and just let it play out. This one pushes its premise to extremes I never imagined possible, ratcheting up an astonishing amount of tension along the way.
And just like with social media, we're very easily affected by the bombardment of small pieces every single day, without realizing how bad it is for us.
It wasn't my favorite, but it was very different. Like eating food that tastes nothing like what you're used to. For that reason alone, I'd recommend it.
America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.
Best books I read in 2025: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of story to motivate and persuade by Will Storr
Best books I read in 2025: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of story to motivate and persuade by Will Storr Bringing Up Baby: An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics by Paul Turke
Best books I read in 2025: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of story to motivate and persuade by Will Storr Bringing Up Baby: An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics by Paul Turke Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier
Notting Hill, in addition to being just a lovely little romantic comedy about two people from entirely mismatched stations in life, trying to negotiate a space in the world they might get to call their own, is one of the best films out there showing at least a little bit of what it’s like to be famous to everyone, everywhere, all the time, forever and ever, amen.
Someone recommended this book after my brother passed away. I didn’t want to read a bunch of books about grief, but this one struck a chord. I wish I had read it before he died.
Good Material by Dolly Alderton A simple story about a struggling stand-up comedian going through a difficult break-up. A funny, sweet book. I enjoyed it.
This book manages to pull all of that together in a way that's genuinely readable and engaging, helped along by anecdotes from his own policymaking experience that both clarify the arguments and make them feel concrete and accessible to a much broader audience.
It's powerful because it's simple without being simplistic and, like Rogoff's book, is interspersed with engaging personal stories that deepen the substantive argument.
It had the best opening sentence of any nonfiction book I read this year: "In 2012, 146 million children were born. That was more than in any prior year. It was also more than in any year since. Millions fewer will be born this year. The year 2012 may well turn out to be the year in which the most humans were ever born—ever as in ever for as long as humanity exists." Such a simple and obvious fact but I had not known it before. I had to keep reading.
I first read it in college and recently, as we approach this milestone, decided to re-read it and was amazed about how fresh and vivid it felt, as well as how nuanced and humane it is.
I have thought a number of films have been riotously funny, but only A Fish Called Wanda made me laugh so hard that I was in very real danger of pissing myself right there in the movie theater.
Mac Mini M4 (16/256GB): I found it very value for money. It's also my first device from Apple and I'm very satisfied using it as a personal computer at home.
Macbook Air M4 (16/256GB): daily driver. Get things done. It's also my second device from Apple and I'm very satisfied using it as a mobility solution.
2025 is where I (and I think the rest of the industry also) first started to internalize the "shape" of LLM intelligence in a more intuitive sense. We're not "evolving/growing animals", we are "summoning ghosts".
Not every plank in his argument is convincing, and the research has evolved since the book first came out a decade ago, but the ambition is impressive and the framework holds up.
The causes and meaning of those events have been debated ever since, and Sides delivers a careful, sympathetic and engaging account of the entirety of Cook's final expedition.
I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each each book feels like another startup and that I've got to go out and make it happen almost as if I've not written one.
That's a really intelligent way place to land because what they will do is woo you with their enthusiasm and then take you down a rabbit hole where you will spend years of your life and have nothing to show.
They learn to trust you that if you're interested, they'll be interested. That what in fact what they're buying into is not the subject, but your interest in the subject.
you grab the listener like I try to grab a reader and get them to the state of mind where they'll let you take them anywhere uh and teach them about stuff that they don't even know they want to learn about.
See's Bridge Mix. My parents had this at their house when we visited in January and we've been buying them throughout the year whenever we come across a See's. The best box to have around the house.
Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits (in Milk Caramel Sea Salt and Cookie Mix), which single-handedly got me through this work year. I shudder to think how many bags of these I ate, but I can barely finish an essay without one.
Full disclosure, I got these for free, but have become unexpectedly obsessed. I wear them constantly and really like how they instantly change the mood of an outfit. Can't really say why they stand out since they're pretty basic but people ask me about them all the time.
It's a beautiful sweater and 100% wool. So far they're pilling a little (to be expected), so I'll definitely be checking in on this one next year. That price is hard to trust.
But Amap is great! Especially since it can be used in English and I think it transliterates your searches to Chinese and the Chinese place names back to English
But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious, because the process of evolution is stymied left, right, and center by inertia. Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution, and this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.
And it’s obvious, it’s obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can’t just have had inscribed stone seals, and many parts of India today write on palm leaf.
And my hunch is that the archaeological evidence that we have on this score is ultimately misleading, because I think this: that probably for a very, very long time before the Sumerians, people in the world, the world of what we call the Middle East, were in contact.
And once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, that’s the crucial thing, that a picture of a foot not only meant foot but it meant the sound of the word for foot.
Good Hang with Amy Poehler: I think this is a wildly popular one now for a reason, it's very fun and I just love how it's chill and mostly comedians hanging out.
Overcommitted: Put simply, thoughtful tech conversations from thoughtful tech people. I'm biased towards this one because it's run by some coworkers, but they are awesome coworkers and it's fun and interesting!
VeggieTales Podcast: Okay this is more for my children than me, but it's a good one for talking about how it's important to be "nice" and stuff (what a concept), and it's been great on roadtrips to visit family!
The US has a lot to learn from other countries for how to catch up to the efficient frontier, especially for certain types of construction (ie: transit) and in certain places in the country (ie: expensive coastal metros).
Sweden, for instance, is often praised for its high adoption of prefabricated construction, but since the 1990s Sweden has had roughly flat construction labor productivity, even as it has made more extensive use of prefabrication.
The goal is not perfect enforcement. Some kids will still find workarounds. The goal is to shift the environment so children are not pressured into digital spaces they don’t want, simply to avoid being left out.
With so many professional money managers afraid to act, with most of the public in the grip of fear and anger, you should put your cash and your courage to work.
probably 50% of the time, I would advise to a client, take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center. Pay the people too much. Get the best practitioners.
the dorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one. You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel. There are loads and loads of value creation components to that dorman which aren't captured in the open the door definition.
But when you pursue efficiency generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors and of course in the process you disregard psychological factors where the greater gains may be found and so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation.
When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making along with their running dog lackey in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very very distant from what your real world customers really care about.
people don't decide like that at the very least you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison.
Nippon Kodo Mori-no-KOH incense. I love this! Incredible bang for your buck, the little box feels so fancy, it smells insane. I'm burning it right now as I write.
COLOR WOW Raise the Root spray. I found out about this on TikTok. I spray when damp and it DOES give my flat Asian hair volume. I don't know how it works, but it does.
There can be no way to participate fully in the potential benefits from the new technology without being exposed to the losses that will arise if the enthusiasm and thus investors’ behavior prove to have been excessive.
There’s a consistent history of transformational technologies generating excessive enthusiasm and investment, resulting in more infrastructure than is needed and asset prices that prove to have been too high. The excesses accelerate the adoption of the technology in a way that wouldn’t occur in their absence.
we will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.
Their words now
Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
While heat pumps can achieve higher efficiency, consumer uptake has been much lower than expected because fundamentally, a heat pump is a 20 year bet on future power prices that most homeowners are unwilling to make.
On the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.
Because when you believe in something, when you become obsessed with something, you sacrifice yourself to it. And that sacrifice actually feels like pain and stress and doubt. Not fun.
ChatGPT, in particular, seemed to just want to validate me, tell me how great I was, reinforce any bad beliefs I might have had, and avoid saying anything uncomfortable.
investors at many tech companies, including most on the large cap list, have given up their corporate governance rights, often voluntarily (through the acceptance of shares with different voting rights), to founders and top management in these companies
I think that the pathway that you would need (in terms of revenue growth and profitability) to justify Nvidia's and OpenAI's current pricing is improbable, but that is just my view
the delusion comes from the reality that if you aggregated these breakeven revenues across companies, the market is not big enough to sustain all of them
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.