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.
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3 August 2025
From one piece When to Hire a Computer Performance Engineering Team (2025) part 1 of 2 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A performance test without an explanation of its limiting factor should be treated as unanalyzed and possibly bogus.Their words
Any performance test should be accompanied by an explanation of the limiting factor, since no explanation will reveal the test wasn't analyzed and the result may be bogus.
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korrents.com
Monitoring tools that do periodic work can themselves cause the latency outliers they were installed to diagnose.Their words
One performance anti-pattern is when a company, to debug one performance problem, installs a monitoring tool that periodically does work and causes application latency outliers.
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Their words
A new performance team can likely find enough optimizations to halve infrastructure spend in their first couple of years, even for companies that have been using commercial performance or observability tools.
From one piece Introducing Better Futures 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Given how much moral progress we should hope to make in the future, and how much we’ll learn about what’s even empirically possible, we should act on the assumption that we have almost no idea what the best feasible futures would look like. Committing today to some particular vision would be a great mistake.
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Their words
I see this as the strongest argument against the better futures perspective, and the reason why I don’t feel confident that work on Flourishing is higher-priority than work on Surviving, rather than merely in the same ballpark.
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korrents.com
A common-sense utopia is much closer to the present day than it is to the best futures actually available to us.Their words
But the difference in value between the world today and that common-sense utopia might be very small compared to the difference between that common-sense utopia and the best futures we could feasibly achieve.
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Their words
On this view, it’s not enough to avoid near-term catastrophe, because the future could still fall far short of what’s possible.
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Their words
This essay series will argue that work on Flourishing is in the same ballpark of priority as work on Surviving.
2 August 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Close to the MachineTheir words
Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine is a memoir I couldn't believe I hadn't read earlier. Many of her observations about engineering culture feel as relevant today as when she was a programmer in the 1980s
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Usesrcmnd.app
OpalTheir words
I'm getting into screen-time blocking. I use the app Opal on a recommendation from Lucas Gelfond. It won't let me scroll Twitter, Substack, or Instagram for 80% of the day. Gmail is also blocked from 11pm to 8am.
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Usesrcmnd.app
MochiTheir words
I initially started making Anki (well, Mochi) cards to keep track of Google DeepMind's LLM lineage—Gopher, Chinchilla, Gato, PaLM, Sparrow, Meena, LaMDA, Bard, Gemini, etc.
+ 2 more
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Lovedrcmnd.app
When Harry Met SallyTheir words
On the other hand, seeing When Harry Met Sally at the Roxie was a total delight. I was grinning for probably 80% of it.
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
MaterialistsTheir words
I assumed Celine Song's Materialists would be as inoffensively cute as Past Lives, but it was even emptier than I expected.
From one piece AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cure 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
From one piece What does AI progress mean for medical progress? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Yet the production methods still can’t make them below $10 per gram, so they’re still not cheap enough for some “obvious” applications like preventing kids getting malaria in a rainy season.
AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com
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Their words
Going all in on AI is not the highest return-on-investment strategy if you care about human flourishing, even if AI might lead to rapid scientific advances.
AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com
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korrents.com
Not every bottleneck on medical progress is one AI can remove, and which ones will remain can be guessed at now.Their words
But I don’t think all bottlenecks on medical progress are equally AI-able in the next decade, and I don’t think all will become irrelevant.
What does AI progress mean for medical progress?blog.jacobtrefethen.com
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Their words
Rapid AI progress does not automatically mean rapid medical progress. If the point of AI progress is human flourishing, we must make other complementary investments too.
What does AI progress mean for medical progress?blog.jacobtrefethen.com
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Their words
Those are why I do not believe that AI could end disease within 10 years on its own, nor that 50-100 years of medical progress could occur 5-10 years after powerful AI due to AI progress alone
AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com
31 July 2025
From one piece Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Genghis Khan chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him, his anda was a questionable relationship but all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters, very common, and they were loyal to him and never, ever revolted against him, never betrayed him.
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Their words
I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.
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korrents.com
Genghis Khan conquered the largest empire in history with an army that never exceeded about 110,000 men.Their words
Genghis Khan's army was extremely good in warfare but small. He never got probably above 100,000, at the most 110,000. That is small.
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Their words
Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.
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Their words
Later, Genghis Khan will realize once he becomes Chinggis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women. And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women, in part not only because of what had happened to his mother, but what happened to him next in his life.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Adventure of the Demonic OxTheir words
Mind-candy fantasy from a highly reliable author, who is not afraid of putting beloved characters through the wringer.
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Their words
Mind candy: A fun travelogue which does what it says in the title. It pretty much satisfies any impulses I might have to actually see any of the artworks in question. No familiarity with art-critical jargon required, though long passages are (more or less explicitly) art criticism.
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Their words
I nonetheless found this book somewhat disappointing, because Jay seemed content to expound the authors he covers in more or less their own terms, rather than subjecting them to anything like actual epistemological or methodological criticism.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Demon DaughterTheir words
Mind-candy fantasy from a highly reliable author, who is not afraid of putting beloved characters through the wringer.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Penric and the BanditTheir words
Mind-candy fantasy from a highly reliable author, who is not afraid of putting beloved characters through the wringer.
30 July 2025
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Their words, before
This means that working on neural networks is NOT getting us closer to AGI, except indirectly.
Their words now
It’s become very difficult for me to maintain the belief in the stupidity of ChatGPT when every time I laugh at it, it ends up ridiculing me 6 months later.
29 July 2025
From one piece Indonesia Climbs the Chain 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Pollution is a price worth paying for escaping poverty only if the people breathing it are the ones who escape.Their words
It’s one thing if residents of Sulawesi like Mr. Jamal and his family have had to risk exposure to toxic pollutants in a successful escape from poverty. It’s another thing entirely if those bearing most of the burden see few of the benefits.
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Their words
Morowali’s poverty rate has seen a modest decline since 2016, from around 15% to 12%, but this puts it squarely in the middle of the pack of other Sulawesi districts—and not far from the decline in the national average, which fell from 10.9% to 8.6% over the same period.
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Their words
Poverty reduction is never a purely technocratic exercise, and questions about industrial policy can never be entirely divorced from those of political economy—including those of global geopolitics.
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korrents.com
Industrial policy that grows a poor country’s economy does not automatically reduce its poverty.Their words
But, peering past the hype around Morowali reminds us that we should be careful before assuming that industrial policy must be pro-poor.
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Their words
In our world, we know of no escape from poverty other than climbing the value chain.
28 July 2025
27 July 2025
25 July 2025
24 July 2025
23 July 2025
From one piece Demis Hassabis: Future of AI, Simulating Reality, Physics and Video Games | Lex Fridman Podcast #475 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But it seems like you can understand it through passive observation, which is pretty surprising to me. And again, I think hints at something underlying about the nature of reality in my opinion, beyond just the cool videos that it generates.
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Their words
I think to the extent that it can predict the next frames in a coherent way, that is a form of understanding, not in the anthropomorphic version of, it's not some kind of deep philosophical understanding of what's going on, I don't think these systems have that, but they certainly have modeled enough of the dynamics, put it that way
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Their words
I think we've proven, and the AI community in general that classical systems, Turing machines can go a lot further than we previously thought. They can do things like model the structures of proteins and play go to better than world champion level. And a lot of people would've thought maybe 10, 20 years ago that was decades away, or maybe you would need some sort of quantum machines to quantum systems to be able to do things like protein folding. And so I think we haven't really even sort of scratched the surface yet of what classical systems so-called could do.
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korrents.com
Information is the most fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy or matter.Their words
And it sort of fits with the way I think about physics in general, which is that I think information is primary, information is the most sort of fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy and matter.
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Their words
And I think the reason that's possible is that in nature, natural systems have structure because they were subject to evolutionary processes that shape them. And if that's true, then you can maybe learn what that structure is.
22 July 2025
20 July 2025
19 July 2025
18 July 2025
17 July 2025
From one piece Assessing Adaptive World Models in Machines with Novel Games (with 13 co-authors) 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
We contend that games provide particularly rich and controlled environments uniquely well-suited for systematically evaluating rapid model adaptation and the process of world model induction.
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korrents.com
An adaptive agent's world model cannot be a static representation learned once and fixedTheir words
For adaptation to complex and changing environments, an agent's world models cannot be static representations learned once and fixed.
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Their words
We expect that building and evaluating AI systems capable of this kind of rapid world model induction will be critical for achieving robust, general AI capable of functioning effectively in the complex and fast-changing real world, and especially in human worlds - the environments that human beings have evolved in, created, and are continually changing and re-creating.
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Their words
However, current understanding and evaluation of world models in artificial intelligence (AI) remains narrow, often focusing on static representations learned from training on massive corpora of data, instead of the efficiency and efficacy in learning these representations through interaction and exploration within a novel environment.
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korrents.com
Human adaptability is fundamentally linked to the efficient construction and refinement of internal world modelsTheir words
We argue that this profound adaptability is fundamentally linked to the efficient construction and refinement of internal representations of the environment, commonly referred to as world models, and we refer to this adaptation mechanism as world model induction.
16 July 2025
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Their words
The state-of-the-art today can be more accurately described as "last-minute, black-box product testing" rather than auditing, and I think this situation threatens public safety, international stability, and sustainable commercial adoption of AI.
From one piece The Jamie Dimon Interview: How JP Morgan Became an $800 Billion Bank 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
the fortress balance sheet is that you run a company serving clients well, you have good margins, good liquidity, good capital. I'm as conservative in accounting as you can find. I don't up-front profits when I can spread them over time.
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Their words
if you look at the history of banks from up until 2007, a lot of banks were earning 30% equity. Most of them went bankrupt. We never did that much. Okay, but in '08 and '09, we were fine, and they weren't.
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korrents.com
In financial services what kills you is leverage and aggressive accounting, not bad luck.Their words
And and the thing about financial services, leverage kills you. Aggressive accounting can kill you, which a lot of companies do do.
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korrents.com
A bank should be managed against the fat tails it can imagine, not against the stress test its regulator hands it.Their words
And so, I always look what I call the fat tails and manage that we can handle all the all the fat tails. And not the stress test the Fed gives us, but all the fat tails.
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Their words
I've always been very risk-conscious. And risk-conscious does not mean getting rid of risk. It means properly pricing it and understanding the potential outcomes.
15 July 2025
From one piece There Is No Long Decline in Fertility 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Birth rates can move in whatever direction a society chooses, whenever it chooses; there is no ratchet.Their words
Surviving fertility rates can go in whatever direction society wants, whenever it wants.
There Is No Long Decline in Fertilitylymanstone.substack.com
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Their words
As a result, natural selection is very unlikely to have produced in humans any predisposition or preference for a certain number of births.
There Is No Long Decline in Fertilitylymanstone.substack.com
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Their words
Thus, TFR as an indicator is cross-culturally biased by social preferences between infanticide and abortion, child neglect and abortion, etc.
There Is No Long Decline in Fertilitylymanstone.substack.com
+ 2 more
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Their words
the key point is that as child mortality declines, live births can be allowed to decline without changing desired family size
There Is No Long Decline in Fertilitylymanstone.substack.com
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Their words
What you can see is that the “long decline” of TFR since the late-19th century is… an illusion! It isn’t real!
There Is No Long Decline in Fertilitylymanstone.substack.com
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Likedrcmnd.app
Everything Is TuberculosisTheir words
Everything Is Tuberculosis is poignant, smart, and at times infuriating.
14 July 2025
13 July 2025
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korrents.com
It is false that the world needs no more food and only better distribution of the food it has.Their words
The main argument they trotted out in that article was that we don’t need more high-yield agriculture because we don’t need more food, just better distribution of the food we already have. That’s wrong
12 July 2025
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Their words, before
I think we need to correct that ratio somewhat by some testimony of just how God damn amazing it is to literally create life
Their words now
those of us who've chosen to do the traditional thing to get married and to have children have an obligation to kind of talk it up a little bit, which would've seen ridiculous again 50 years ago that you'd have to talk up something so fundamental of that.
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Their words, before
it's a luxury good like you're not paying the penalty for that the people who embrace it and think that they can just ask AI for everything or they can just look everything up but they don't have to understand the copy pasta that they slam into their project they're the ones who going to suffer
Their words now
Where I get fired up, and this ties back to the AI discussion, is when that's turned into this meme, that programmers no longer have to be competent. I mean the AI is gonna figure it out. The generators is gonna figure it out. I don't need to know SQL, active record is gonna abstract it away from me. No, no, no dude, hold up. The path here is competence.
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korrents.com
Ruby must never get static typing: dynamic duck typing is the essence of what makes Ruby Ruby.Their words, before
static typing is the one thing I will literally die on the hill for for Ruby
Their words now
It's the essence of what makes Ruby Ruby. This is why I don't fully understand when people call for Ruby to add static typing. 'Cause to me, it's the bedrock of what this is.
+ 2 more
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Their words, before
I enjoy it even almost like as a sort of pair programmer AI pair programmer who doesn't drive who's just there to give suggestions to know the API to do all these other things but the second it starts wanting to autocomplete my code I'm like yeah I'm out bro
Their words now
I love chiseling my code and the way I use AI is in a separate window. I don't let it drive my code. I've tried that. I've tried the cursors and the wind surfaces and I don't enjoy that way of writing. And one of the reasons I don't enjoy that way of writing is I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers.
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On changing their mind
I used to think it required more churn to get progress to stay on the leading edge of new stuff. And I wrote this before I experienced the indignity of the 2010s in the JavaScript community.
11 July 2025
10 July 2025
9 July 2025
8 July 2025
From one piece What I learned watching 78 videos from Tesla's Austin robotaxis 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A good robotaxi demonstration in one city does not mean the company is ready to scale the service.Their words
But I don’t think Tesla’s accomplishments over the last two weeks—impressive as they are—mean that Tesla is ready to quickly scale up its service.
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Their words
These videos exceeded my expectations. Tesla’s robotaxi rollout wasn’t perfect, but it went as well as anyone could have expected.
7 July 2025
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korrents.com
Permissive licences are the better way to release free software and free content, because they maximise adoption.On changing their mind
Historically, I was a fan of the permissive approach (eg. my blog is under the WTFPL). More recently, I am warming up to the copyleft approach.
6 July 2025
From one piece The Rise of Bitcoin Stocks and Bonds 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Bitcoin is not going to catch on as a charity. In order for spending it to catch on persistently at scale (i.e. not just billions of dollar-equivalents in annual global medium-of-exchange volume, but trillions), it has to solve problems for spenders and/or recipients that other solutions are not doing.
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Their words
If a new monetary network with its own unit (i.e. not pegged to an existing currency as a credit rail on top of it, but rather a fully parallel system to central banks) is going to bootstrap from zero to massive, it requires upward volatility.
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Their words
So, daily leverage is pretty bad unless you're a short-term trader. Volatility hurts that type of leverage.
5 July 2025
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army Victory that Shaped World War IITheir words
Perhaps that Goldman makes, at times, too strong a case for the importune of the Nomonhan war, but the conflict surely deserves much more that the oblivion into which it seems to have been consigned by political historians.
4 July 2025
From one piece The ITTAGE indirect branch predictor 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Using a neural network is likely to become easier than designing a custom-tuned prediction algorithm for many tasks.Their words
in 2025 it might end up being easier to just throw a neural net at the problem, instead of a custom-designed-and-tuned prediction algorithm!
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korrents.com
Most conditional branches in software are strongly biased toward one outcome rather than close to fifty-fifty.Their words
most branches are heavily "biased" one way or another - e.g. a "branch taken" rate of 10% or 90% is more common than 50%
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korrents.com
Modern CPUs can now predict the indirect dispatch jump in a bytecode interpreter loop with high accuracy.Their words
Modern CPUs mostly no longer struggle to predict the bytecode-dispatch indirect jump inside a "conventional" bytecode interpreter loop.
3 July 2025
2 July 2025
1 July 2025
From one piece How do we Boost Birth Rates? 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
cultural engineering is extremely difficult in the 21st century: in this age of infinite personalisation, people can swipe past anything they dislike
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korrents.com
Culture can be changed, so falling birth rates are a fixable problem rather than a one-way ratchet of modernity.Their words
My qualitative research has taught me one thing: culture is malleable! So surely this issue is fixable!
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korrents.com
Having children is contagious: people are more likely to become parents when the people around them already are.Their words
Community comes into play. If everyone else has kids, this shifts expectations and creates club goods.
+ 2 more
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Their words
People are more likely to have kids if it’s FUN - relative to alternatives. As entertainment-technology improves, it generates a tantalising menu of ways to spend our lives.
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Their words
Once women are in control of their fertility, they only procreate if they expect rewards - whether that is personal fulfillment or social approval.
30 June 2025
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Their words
If something is behind a unique paywall, then almost all of my readers can’t read it, and the post is effectively outside of the broader conversation.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Dwarkesh PodcastTheir words
I highly recommend the podcast and watch him on YouTube.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Marginal RevolutionTheir words
Most of the remaining alpha in blogs is in Marginal Revolution and LessWrong. Without either of those this blog would be a lot worse.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
LessWrongTheir words
Most of the remaining alpha in blogs is in Marginal Revolution and LessWrong. Without either of those this blog would be a lot worse.
+ 2 more
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Case Against EducationTheir words
I found The Case Against Education and Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids both extremely valuable.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Selfish Reasons to Have More KidsTheir words
I found The Case Against Education and Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids both extremely valuable.
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korrents.com
Grass-fed organic beef is worse for the climate and the planet than beef finished in a feedlot.Their words
We need better beef - which means more efficient beef, not organic grass-fed beef, which is even worse for the climate and the planet than conventional feedlot-finished beef - but in the rich world we also need to eat less beef.
29 June 2025
28 June 2025
26 June 2025
25 June 2025
24 June 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
HelixTheir words
I’ve been really impressed - Helix is fast, the default features are great and I don’t anticipate returning to vim.
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Likedrcmnd.app
ZellijTheir words
Finally: tmux, which I had been happily using for many years, but slowly collecting configuration for. I decided to give Zellij a try, and haven’t looked back.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
TactileTheir words
I took inspiration from Omakub, which is where I discovered Tactile - a GNOME extension for tiling windows to a custom on-screen grid using the keyboard. I’ve found this to be invaluable, and easily the best window management experience for GNOME.
+ 2 more
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Likedrcmnd.app
Space BarTheir words
I’ve grown to like Space Bar - it provides desktop workspaces akin to those in Sway/Hyprland which enabled me to use the muscle memory I’d developed over years.
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Usesrcmnd.app
StarshipTheir words
I switched to zsh around 2013 and have used it every day since: starting with the infamous Oh My Zsh, powerlevel9k, and subsequently powerlevel10k, and finally settling on Starship with a couple of zsh plugins such as zsh-autosuggestions and zsh-syntax-highlighting.
23 June 2025
From one piece Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide 2 beliefs · oneusefulthing.org
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korrents.com
Current AI models cannot produce insights beyond human understanding, however impressive they seemTheir words
You should remember that the best AIs can perform at the level of a very smart person on some tasks, but current models cannot provide miraculous insights beyond human understanding.
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korrents.com
Because of hallucination risk, you should use AI first on topics you already understandTheir words
The risk of hallucination is why I always recommend using AI for topics you understand until you have a sense for their capabilities and issues.
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Usesrcmnd.app
OpenAI o3Their words
I use o3, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro for any serious work that I do.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
GrokTheir words
by Elon Musk’s xAI is good if you are a big X user, though the company has not been very transparent about how its AI operates.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Microsoft CopilotTheir words
offers many of the features of ChatGPT and is accessible to users through Windows, but it can be hard to control what models you are using and when.
+ 2 more
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
DeepSeek r1Their words
r1, a Chinese model, is very capable and free to use, but is missing a few features from the other companies and it is not clear that they will keep up in the long term.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Veo 3Their words
Generally, ChatGPT is stronger. On video creation, however, Gemini’s Veo 3 is very impressive, and you get several free uses a day
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Fever Pitch: A Novel About Selling Your Vision, Raising Venture Capital, and Launching Your StartupTheir words
was delightful!
22 June 2025
From one piece An Important New Study on Phones and Kids 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Little is lost by preventing a 14-year-old from accessing TikTok or Snapchat, or telling a 10-year-old they cannot have unrestricted access to the internet through their own smartphone, but so much will almost certainly be gained.
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korrents.com
Researchers are no longer divided about whether smartphones and social media are bad for children.Their words
But, it’s also now clear that this field is no longer actually divided on the question of whether, generally speaking, smartphones and social media are bad for kids.
From one piece Evaluating Long-Context Question & Answer Systems 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
LLM-based evaluation methods are more reliable and nuanced than traditional automated metricsTheir words
This is why model-based evaluation is increasingly popular-it offers more reliable and nuanced evals than traditional metrics.
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korrents.com
People find pairwise comparisons of answers easier and more consistent to judge than absolute ratingsTheir words
People find comparing two answers easier than assigning absolute ratings, resulting in greater consistency across annotators.
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Their words
Since these datasets are likely already part of model training data, we shouldn't rely solely on them to evaluate our Q&A system.
21 June 2025
20 June 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
AegyptTheir words
Crowley is one of the great unrecognized novelists of our time, and his Aegypt novel sequence seems exactly on point for the strange days we live in.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
StonerTheir words
Williams sees a soul where others see a stand-in.
19 June 2025
From one piece Standards, Incentives, and Evidence: The Frontier AI Governance Triad 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The stronger such policies are, the more "absence of evidence" (lack of visible whistleblowing or lawsuits) can become "evidence of absence" (regarding flagrant violations).
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Their words
As AI gets more capable, the risks associated with mistaken claims, fraudulent claims, or too-vague-to-be-verified claims will increase, and a cloud of suspicion between competitors could drive corner-cutting (indeed, this is happening already and could get worse).
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Their words
governing frontier AI requires standards for safety and security, incentives for the leading AI developers to follow those standards, and evidence that the standards are being followed.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The System: A Novel of the Deep StateTheir words
I love Barry’s writing and read every book he writes. He has total mastery of the contemporary thriller with extraordinarily vibrant characters and a zillion endnotes that tie to things that are actually happening in the real world.
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Readrcmnd.app
Little Black Classics Box SetTheir words
It’s my summer reading project, which is a curated library of eighty pocket-sized books that encapsulate the breadth and diversity of literary history.
18 June 2025
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Their words
the current situation in Iran shows that even if an "IAEA for AI" is necessary for some purposes, it won't be sufficient for resolving the tricky geopolitical issues raised by AI.
16 June 2025
From one piece Growth Measurements 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
there are dozens more assets like this under development right now, all deserving clarity rather than opacity.
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Their words
Shoulder generation (in late summer) of any given year is generally a higher share of global electricity demand than the peak generation (spring) of the year prior.
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korrents.com
How you measure the present strongly shapes what can be extrapolated about the near future.Their words
Extrapolating from the present day into the near future is highly dependent upon how we measure the present day.
15 June 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
PenséesTheir words
A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Conquest of the UselessTheir words
A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
CarnetsTheir words
A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Brown and Blue NotebooksTheir words
A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Pillow BookTheir words
A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.
14 June 2025
From one piece Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #472 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Formalising a proof in Lean currently takes about ten times the effort of writing it out: doable, but annoying.Their words
So right now I estimate that the time and effort taken to formalize it, proof is about 10 times the amount taken to write it out. So it's doable, but it's annoying.
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Their words
Yeah, that was a leading candidate for many decades. I think it's slowly pulling out of fashion. It's not matching experiment.
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Their words
But I have faith that we've been doing this for centuries and we've made progress before. There's no reason why we should stop.
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Their words
I'm much more comfortable with the fox paradigm. Yeah. So yeah, I like looking for analogies, narratives. I spend a lot of time… If there's a result, I see it in one field, and I like the result, it's a cool result, but I don't like the proof, it uses types of mathematics that I'm not super familiar with, I often try to re-prove it myself using the tools that I favor.
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Their words
If something holds 99.99% of the time, that's good enough for most things. But mathematicians are one of the few people who really care about whether really 100% of all situations are covered by it.
From one piece Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #472 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Setting a worse task against the one you are avoiding is a procrastination hack that actually works.Their words
It’s when you really don’t want to do a thing that you imagine a thing you don’t want to do more that’s worse than that and then in that way, you procrastinate by not doing the thing that’s worse. It’s a nice hack, it actually works.
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Their words
I don’t believe it’s providing a kind of formal explanation of the different positions. It’s just saying which position is better or not that you can intuit as a human being, and then from that, we humans can construct a theory of the matter.
13 June 2025
12 June 2025
From one piece NASA Is Worth Saving 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Today's NASA is a shadow of the agency it once was.Their words
It is clear, however, that today’s NASA is but a shadow of its former self.
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korrents.com
NASA is worth saving.Their words
I believe NASA is worth saving.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Claude SonnetTheir words
I exclusively use the cheaper Sonnet model. It’s perfectly adequate for my needs, and in fact, I prefer its outputs over the more expensive Opus model.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
GoTheir words
I’ve evaluated agent performance across different languages my workload, and if you can choose your language, I strongly recommend Go for new backend projects.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
ViteTheir words
Tailwind and vite are great, no complaints there.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
TanStack RouterTheir words
Tanstack’s file based router does not make me super happy.
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Usesrcmnd.app
VimTheir words
This approach has even revived my usage of Vim, which lacks AI integration.
11 June 2025
From one piece Jacob Will Work For You 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The high value human tasks, like understanding the client's true pain points and deciding on priorities and trade-offs, would be easier with a smaller, proactive team.
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Their words
clients want a lot more from a software vendor than a solution that performs ABC by XYZ date.
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Their words
From my experience, a lot of company culture is downstream from profit margins.
10 June 2025
From one piece The Gentle Singularity 2 beliefs · blog.samaltman.com
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korrents.com
AI agents can now do real cognitive work, and writing software is permanently changed as a result.Their words
2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same.
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Their words
There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before.
From one piece Do LLMs really reason? 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Consistent with the Kantian hypothesis, reasoning models automatically gain greater autonomy, self-consistency and long-horizon planning ability for free.
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korrents.com
A true artificial general intelligence cannot exist without being recognized as a moral subject.Their words
It follows that a true AGI with full, human-level autonomy is inconceivable in the Kantian sense without also gaining our recognition as a moral subject.
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korrents.com
The success of large language models vindicates semantic inferentialism over symbolic, rule-based approaches to AI.Their words
The success of LLMs can thus be seen as vindicating semantic inferentialism against earlier, symbolic approaches to AI that tried and failed to explicate the rules of ordinary language using formal logic.
9 June 2025
From one piece A How to Hire a Product Manager Retrospective 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Advice is unreliable because it reflects hindsight, survivorship, and confirmation bias.Their words
Advice is prone to hindsight, survivorship, and confirmation biases.
A How to Hire a Product Manager Retrospectivebringthedonuts.com
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Their words
the word "listen" doesn't appear anywhere in the essay, and listening is arguably a product manager's most important tool.
A How to Hire a Product Manager Retrospectivebringthedonuts.com
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korrents.com
The most human aspects of product management are the least likely to be automated by AI.Their words
But the human stuff that actually matters most in PM'ing is the least likely to be automated by AI.
A How to Hire a Product Manager Retrospectivebringthedonuts.com
8 June 2025
From one piece How I program with Agents 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Most software has too few users or too short a lifespan for long-term maintenance costs to matter.Their words
Very few programs ever reach the point that they are heavily used and long-lived. Almost everything has few users, or is short-lived, or both.
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korrents.com
Graphics chips have far more room for future performance gains than CPUs, which are nearing physical limits.Their words
GPUs are not nearly as restricted in their future progress as CPUs which are far more constrained in how they can physically improve (compiler-driven ILP only goes so far).
7 June 2025
From one piece A knockout blow for LLMs? 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Worse, as the latest Apple papers shows, LLMs may well work on your easy test set (like Hanoi with 4 discs) and seduce you into thinking it has built a proper, generalizable solution when it does not.
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Their words
What the Apple paper shows, most fundamentally, regardless of how you define AGI, is that LLMs are no substitute for good well-specified conventional algorithms.
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Their words
And good luck getting to “alignment” or “safety” without reliabilty.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
Anyone who thinks large language models are a direct route to transformative AGI is kidding themselves.Their words
But anybody who thinks LLMs are a direct route to the sort AGI that could fundamentally transform society for the good is kidding themselves.
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Their words
But this particular approach has limits that are clearer by the day.
6 June 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Mistral Small 3Their words
My favorite model release from January was another local model, Mistral Small 3
5 June 2025
From one piece Hegel and the AI Mind 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
While the fact that merely scaling up AI models often results in qualitative leaps in performance may seem empirically mysterious, in retrospect it should be seen as a rational necessity.
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Their words
higher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.
From one piece Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet | Lex Fridman Podcast #471 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
What survives of podcasting once AI delivers information better is the part where you watch a human struggle with it.Their words
I think the element of podcasting or audio books that is about information gathering, that part might be removed, or that might be more efficiently and in a compelling way done by AI. But then it’ll be just nice to hear humans struggle with the information, contend with the information, try to internalize it
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Their words
the other thing I think people don’t often talk about is probability of doom without AI. So there’s all these other ways that humans can destroy themselves and it’s very possible, at least I believe so, that AI will help us become smarter, kinder to each other, more efficient.
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Their words
I would say my p(doom) is about 10%.
From one piece Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet | Lex Fridman Podcast #471 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So I do think scaling laws are working, but it's tough to get, at any given time, the models we all use the most, this maybe a few months behind the maximum capability we can deliver because that won't be the fastest, easiest to use, et cetera.
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Their words
But I do think when it comes to artistic free expression, I think that's one of those values we should work hard to defend.
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korrents.com
AI video will enable more filmmakers than have ever existed; the expansionary side of it is underestimated.Their words
There is no doubt in me that we will enable more filmmakers than have ever been. You're going to empower a lot more people. So I think there is an expansionary aspect of this, which is underestimated, I think.
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Their words
When the internet created blogs, you heard from so many more people. But with AI, I think that number won't be in the few hundreds of thousands. It'll be tens of millions of people, maybe even a billion people putting out things into the world in a deeper way.
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Their words
Many years ago, I think it might've been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It'll be more profound than fire or electricity. So, I have to back myself. I still think that's the case.
4 June 2025
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Their words, before
The problem is that the conversational interface is potent and that the AI is trained on a lot of human text input which unfortunately is probably enough to do real damage if that conversational interface is hooked up with something that has real world consequences.
Their words now
While all this is happening, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on what AI means to the world and I am becoming increasingly optimistic about our future. It’s obvious now that we’re undergoing a tremendous shift.
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Their words
Do I program any faster? Not really. But it feels like I’ve gained 30% more time in my day because the machine is doing the work.
3 June 2025
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Rebel's ClinicTheir words
Shatz brings this Plutarch-like exemplary life to the reader with adroitness and skillful attention to detail as well as awareness of Fanon’s uniqueness, both in terms of personality, and places: centers of the new world that he was trying to create.
From one piece Physicality: the new age of UI 3 beliefs · lux.camera
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Their words
Opaque, inert and obstructive elements might occupy the same place as full-screen command line interfaces — a powerful niche UI that was a marker in history, passed on by the windowed environment of the multi-tasking, graphical user interface revolution.
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Their words
We’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality.
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Their words
It actually means that to make it easier for users to transition from something they were used to — in this case, phones typically being slabs with a grid of buttons on them — to what things had become — phones were all-screen, so they could show any kind of button or interface imaginable.
2 June 2025
From one piece My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts 3 beliefs · fly.io
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Their words
The code in an agent that actually “does stuff” with code is not, itself, AI. This should reassure you. It’s surprisingly simple systems code, wired to ground truth about programming in the same way a Makefile is.
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Their words
LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google.
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Their words
All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career.
From one piece Lombard Odier, Oxford University and Sustainable Finance The Remarkable Transformation of a Discrete, Swiss Private Bank 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
There is, however, one approach that tops all of them - which the Swiss banking industry has not yet achieved, but is destined to. And that is to become a centre of true investing excellence.
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Their words
I had always thought that all "Intelligent Investing" is "Value Investing". And that true value is always sustainable. In otherh words, "All Intelligent Finance is Sustainable Finance."
1 June 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Selfish GeneTheir words
At one extreme, something you read can change your whole way of thinking. The Selfish Gene did this to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you do.
31 May 2025
30 May 2025
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Their words
Personally, I wouldn't use Robinhood. This is more of a platform designed for traders.
From one piece The Trump Tariffs 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
AI-enhanced access to information makes copying top investors' strategies smarter than ever before.Their words
There is more access to information than ever before. And that access is only enhanced by AI. Times could not be better for shameless cloners.
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Their words
There is everything to play for, and we can still all come out better off.
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korrents.com
Tariff announcements function as political theater and can be reversed as easily as they were imposed.Their words
The tariffs create political headlines that distract. But just as they can be easily announced, they can just as easily be changed or removed.
29 May 2025
28 May 2025
From one piece Why we stopped building subways cheaply 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money.Their words
Political costs and civic opposition will often make a technology unviable regardless of how the dollars and cents add up.
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Their words
Cities began to prefer subways to elevateds, despite the fact that they were two to four times as expensive to build as elevated trains.
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Their words
Cut and cover will sometimes be the best choice from a basic cost-benefit perspective, as will elevated rail, and both are useful to have in the tunnel construction toolbox for that reason.
From one piece 10 Years of Engineering Ladders 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The Tyranny of Structurelessness has yet to be overcome, and for those who still care about creating strong, transparent, equitable organizations, this work matters.
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Their words
Assuming you are still hiring junior engineers (you really should be even in this AI era), the good ones will learn quickly and want to see career progress in their first few years of working.
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korrents.com
Defining what expertise looks like in a job family is not HR’s work, and a career ladder left to them will be wrong.Their words
Don’t let (or make!) HR do all of the work. It’s really not their job to define expertise in your functions.
+ 1 more
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Their words
You should not try to create a ladder that functions as a pure checklist or scorecard that guarantees promotion if people check enough boxes; promotions are as much about the needs of the organization as the skills of the employees.
From one piece What Was The War on Drugs? Part V 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
After two decades of the war on drugs, drugs were cheaper and more potent than when it began.Their words
After two decades of the War on Drugs, in other words, drugs were much cheaper and more potent than they were when the War on Drugs began.
What Was The War on Drugs? Part Vthecausalfallacy.substack.com
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korrents.com
Drug enforcement cut casual use and barely touched heavy users, who account for most of the drugs consumed.Their words
But by the available evidence, the War on Drugs was far less successful at reducing use among the “hard core” of users, mostly meaning people addicted to their drug of choice.
What Was The War on Drugs? Part Vthecausalfallacy.substack.com
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Their words
Drug offenders never accounted for a particularly large fraction of the U.S. prison population, peaking at about 22 percent of state prisoners in 1990.
What Was The War on Drugs? Part Vthecausalfallacy.substack.com
27 May 2025
26 May 2025
From one piece Post 51: Socratic Persuasion: Giving Opinionated Yet Truth-Seeking Advice 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It's a lot easier for someone to engage with an argument if they generated the key steps themselves by answering my questions - if imposed by me, it sparks contrarianism and defensiveness
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korrents.com
The person receiving advice usually knows more about their own situation than the person giving it does.Their words
No matter how much I know about a domain, the other person will always know far more about their own situation, context, beliefs, skills, preferences, etc than I do.
25 May 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Anthropic prompt engineering documentationTheir words
I still think Anthropic have the best prompting documentation of any LLM provider.
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Readrcmnd.app
How Does the Psychiatrist Know?: On the Epistemology of Psychiatric Diagnostic ReasoningTheir words
Recently I reviewed Adrian Kind’s 2025 book, “How Does the Psychiatrist Know?: On the Epistemology of Psychiatric Diagnostic Reasoning,” on this substack. I had mentioned that Kind’s book is the first systematic, in-depth, book-length philosophical investigation into how psychiatrists arrive at their diagnostic conclusions.
24 May 2025
From one piece James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles | Lex Fridman Podcast #470 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The fall of France in 1940 was half German operational brilliance and half French failure and incompetence.Their words
I mean, the reason why France is subdued in 1940 is 50% brilliance of the Germans and their operational art in that particular instance, and 50% French failure really, and incompetence.
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Their words
I mean, it is largely down to incompetence of the Red Army and the Soviet leadership in the summer of 1941 that they get as far as they do. I mean, Barbarossa should never have come close to being a victory.
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Their words
So people always talk about the Nazi war machine. In a way, it’s a kind of misnomer, because you’re sort of suggesting that it’s highly mechanized and industrialized, and all the rest of it. And nothing could be further from the truth. The spearhead is, but the rest of it is not.
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Their words
So when you’re talking about Operation Barbarossa, to go back to your original question, Lex, you’re dealing with an operation on such a vast scale, that that operational level of war is absolutely vital to its chances of success or failure. It doesn’t matter how good your individual commanders are at the front. If you haven’t got the backup, it’s not going to work.
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Their words
Whereas, there’s also another point, which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical and inefficient, because the larger the army, the more people you’ve got to feed, the more barracks you’ve got to have, the more space you’ve got to have for training, the more people you’re taking out of your workforce to produce tanks and shells, and all the rest of it, because they’re tramping around with rifles.
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World EconomyTheir words
Nor do I do many promotional emails (this is the first in nearly a year), but if you want to provide some indirect support, and get what I sincerely think to be a very good book while you’re at it
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Just For FunTheir words
Just For Fun - Linus Torvalds (Harper, 2002)
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Where Wizards Stay Up LateTheir words
Where Wizards Stay Up Late - Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon (Simon & Schuster, 1998)
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Skunk WorksTheir words
Skunk Works - Ben R. Rich & Leo Janos (Black Bay Books, 1996)
+ 2 more
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Worst Journey in the WorldTheir words
The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard (Penguin, 2006/1922)
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The No Asshole RuleTheir words
The No Asshole Rule - Robert I. Sutton (Business Plus, 2010)
23 May 2025
22 May 2025
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Their words
USAID is not, itself, a charity. It is an organization that funds other charities.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Chasing HopeTheir words
Chasing Hope made me think a lot about what kind of person chooses to run toward the hardest problems—and keep going back until they’re solved.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Personal HistoryTheir words
That story is told in her riveting memoir Personal History, which came out in 1997—just a few years before she passed away—and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
21 May 2025
From one piece 3 Years of Extremely Remote Work 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Giving local staff authority over more-qualified remote workers reduces a company's competitivenessTheir words
there's a power imbalance: the local worker is in charge and doesn't have to listen. This reduces company competitiveness.
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korrents.com
Remote workers are often passed over for opportunities in favor of less-qualified local colleaguesTheir words
Opportunities can be given to local workers despite the remote worker being more qualified, or even number one in the world in that area.
From one piece The Era Of The Business Idiot 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.
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korrents.com
The people running companies are selected for resembling a leader rather than for being effective at anything.Their words
Decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership means that the people running companies have been selected not based on their actual efficacy — especially as the position became defined by its lack of actual production — but on whether they resemble what a manager or executive is meant to look like based on the work that somebody else did.
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korrents.com
Management has stopped meaning doing work and now means maintaining a culture of dominance and extraction.Their words
Management as a concept no longer means doing "work," but establishing cultures of dominance and value extraction.
+ 2 more
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Their words
The Chief Executive — who makes over 300 times more than their average worker — is no longer a leadership position, but a kind of figurehead measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization of their company.
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Their words
We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
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korrents.com
Means-testing the winter fuel payment is a tough decision that has to be taken, and it should stand.Their words, before
No Prime Minister wants to do what we have to do in relation to the winter fuel allowance, but we have to take the tough decision to stabilise our economy to ensure that we can grow it for the future.
Their words now
However, I recognise that people are still feeling the pressure of the cost of living crisis, including pensioners, and as the economy improves, we want to make sure that people feel those improvements each day as their lives go forward. That is why we want to ensure that more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments as we go forward.
19 May 2025
From one piece Lessons from Spain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It's all part of the political culture wars where everything gets weaponised to push an agenda, score points against opponents or curry favour.
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korrents.com
The failure of wind or solar power to show up has never been the primary cause of a major grid blackout.Their words
While renewables are almost always blamed in the aftermath of major power cuts or grid disruption - and the way they have been integrated into the grid has certainly been found to compound problems - the simple failure of wind or solar power to show up has never yet been found to be the primary cause.
18 May 2025
17 May 2025
16 May 2025
15 May 2025
From one piece Why are solar panels and batteries from China so cheap? 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Another factor that is killing Europe’s competitiveness — not just for batteries but for many industrial products — is the high electricity costs.
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Their words
That’s because most clean energy jobs are in deployment and maintenance rather than manufacturing, and since higher costs slow down the rollout of renewables, increasing prices reduces the total number of people working in clean energy (even if the number working in manufacturing increases).
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korrents.com
A country cannot fund its own industrial strategy and call the same policy cheating when China does it.Their words
But you cannot support these programs while calling out China for “cheating” for doing the same.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
Forced labour in Chinese clean-energy supply chains is real, and it is not why the goods are cheap.Their words
But my point is that this is still not the reason (or is only a very small reason) why these goods from China are cheaper than elsewhere. The main driver of lower labour costs has been automation; not having a human worker at all.
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Their words
But, China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.
14 May 2025
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korrents.com
Biological age is moot; people from about 17 with an adult mind until senility or dementia are all pretty much equal.Their words
Your actual biological age is really moot. Anybody over the age of, I don't know, 17 that has a pretty adult mind, all the way up until you're senile and getting Alzheimer's or dementia, anything between there, we're all pretty much equal.
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korrents.com
How something is presented completely changes a person’s experience, enjoyment, or frequency of use of it.Their words
How you present something to somebody completely changes their experience of it, their enjoyment of it, or even how often they're going to use it.
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Their words
the tool is used when you are overwhelmed with too many options. You've said yes to too many things, and you need to raise the bar all the way up so that almost everything doesn't pass the bar. It's a tool for a certain situation so I rarely use it. I would not call it a approach to life that everyone should use all the time.
+ 2 more
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Their words
As much as possible, try to not predict what the future may hold, but just wait as long as possible for that future to become the present and show you what it actually needs.
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korrents.com
When something repulses you, steer into it to learn more about it instead of avoiding it.Their words
If you notice that something repulses you and you have like a revulsion response to something, steer into it to learn more about it instead of avoiding it.
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korrents.com
Germany will provide whatever money the Bundeswehr needs to become the strongest conventional army in Europe.Their words
Die Bundesregierung wird zukünftig alle finanziellen Mittel zur Verfügung stellen, die die Bundeswehr braucht, um zur konventionell stärksten Armee Europas zu werden.
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Usesrcmnd.app
StravaTheir words
Strava — for tracking runs, rides, and swims.
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Usesrcmnd.app
AllTrailsTheir words
AllTrails — for hiking and trail planning.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Google PhotosTheir words
Google Photos — preferred for photo management over Apple Photos.
+ 2 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
Pixelmator ProTheir words
Pixelmator Pro — light photo editing when needed.
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Usesrcmnd.app
DropboxTheir words
Dropbox — primary cloud backup, for now.
12 May 2025
From one piece Conversational Interfaces: the Good, the Ugly & the Billion-Dollar Opportunity 4 beliefs · lg.substack.com
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Their words
Conversational UIs are great at quickly getting to the first 70%, but suck at offering easy controls over narrower areas for iteration.
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korrents.com
A blank chat box is lazy: it violates the first rule of a good user experience, that it is obvious what you can do.Their words
The problem with a blank chat box on a blank page is that it violates the first rule of a high-quality user experience: it isn’t obvious what I can do.
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Their words
The technology powering ChatGPT had already launched prior to November 30th, 2022. It was just wrapped in a different interface. Very few people paid attention. Why did ChatGPT explode in popularity? Because of its obvious chat interface, which everyone intuitively already knew how to use it.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Sometimes designers will go to great lengths to make a user interface novel, or minimal, or simple. This is the wrong goal. Novelty, minimalism or simplicity are good heuristics for obviousness, but do not mistake the means for the end.
From one piece Traveler’s Tales 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.
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korrents.com
Volatile, stop-start trade policy undermines the ability to make durable industrial investment decisions.Their words
a juddering, jarring trade motion is not the stuff of which durable industrial decision-making is made.
From one piece Pasturised 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
This story, wrapped in romantic cottagecore, is now the most active and seductive frontier of climate-science denial.
-
Their words
In reality, beef and lamb are the most land-hungry and climate-damaging of all farm products.
From one piece The one thing that will determine whether the market makes you wealthy or leaves you bleeding on the side of the road 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Nobody can reliably predict when market drops will occur, how deep they'll go, or when they'll end.Their words
You can't predict when they happen, how deep they'll go, or when they will recover.
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korrents.com
Market corrections, bear markets and crashes are a normal, recurring part of investing.Their words
corrections, bears and crashes are all a perfectly normal part of the process.
From one piece Why Tony Blair needs to reset his climate reset 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The inconvenient facts are that SMRs has so far disappointed, and look like being as slow to get through the permitting process as GW-scale reactors, and even more expensive.
Why Tony Blair needs to reset his climate resetliebreich.com
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korrents.com
Carbon capture and storage cannot be economically competitive without a policy that prices carbon.Their words
CCS can never be competitive in the sense of working economically in the absence of a policy framework to price in the cost of carbon, unlike clean electricity.
Why Tony Blair needs to reset his climate resetliebreich.com
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korrents.com
Direct air capture costing hundreds of dollars per tonne is too expensive to be part of the climate solution.Their words
Whatever the solution to climate change is going to be, it is certainly not going to involve anything that costs $1,000 per tonne of carbon removed, or even the $400 to $600 that they promise by 2030.
Why Tony Blair needs to reset his climate resetliebreich.com
11 May 2025
9 May 2025
8 May 2025
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Their words
So no, UX doesn’t die; it metamorphoses. We’ll still craft humane experiences, but increasingly through policies, protocols, and orchestrations rather than panels and palettes.
-
Their words
The gravity of existing decisions in current systems requires so much energy to reach escape velocity that you tend to conform rather than explore. Essentially you're bent back to where you started, rather than arcing out towards a new horizon.
7 May 2025
6 May 2025
5 May 2025
From one piece Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In other words, the singularity ends up in their future and they can no more avoid the singularity than they can avoid time coming their way. There’s no shenanigans you can do once you’re inside the black hole to try to skirt it.
-
Their words
Absolutely. The world flocked here. And that won’t be the case if we no longer have intellectual freedom.
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korrents.com
Science is agnostic about what it is used for: the same physics that explained why stars shine also built the bomb.Their words
And that’s what I mean by science is agnostic. Right? It’s the same technology overcoming a critical mass, igniting thermonuclear fusion.
+ 2 more
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Their words
But then I think that there’s a confusion that dead stars, these very, very massive stars that die, are synonymous with the phenomenon of black hole. And it’s really not the case. Black holes are more general and more fundamental than just the death state of a star.
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Their words
The black hole is not the mass crushed to a point. The black hole is the event horizon. And the event horizon is really just a point in spacetime or a region at spacetime.
From one piece Why Great Leaders Embrace Humor and Playfulness 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A leader who projects unflappable seriousness causes their team to hide problems and honest feedback.Their words
Nobody wants to follow a joyless leader. If your presence signals, "Everything is fine. I've got this all figured out. Please don't show me anything messy," your team will take the hint.
Why Great Leaders Embrace Humor and Playfulnessbringthedonuts.com
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korrents.com
Playfulness and humor in leadership build authenticity and credibility rather than undermine it.Their words
Playfulness and humor won't erode your credibility. They amplify your presence. They make you real. And people follow real.
Why Great Leaders Embrace Humor and Playfulnessbringthedonuts.com
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Carrie Soto Is BackTheir words
But Carrie Soto Is Back was spectacular.
-
Likedrcmnd.app
The Big GambleTheir words
The Big Gamble was good.
4 May 2025
1 May 2025
From one piece Why We Think 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
model CoTs could be biased due to lack of explicit training objectives aimed at encouraging faithful reasoning
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korrents.com
Longer test-time thinking improves an AI model's robustness to adversarial or unusual inputs.Their words
thinking for longer should be especially useful when the model is presented with an unusual input, such as an adversarial example or jailbreak attempt
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korrents.com
Large language models cannot reliably self-correct their own mistakes without external feedback.Their words
this self-correction capability turns out to not exist intrinsically among LLMs and does not easily work out of the box, due to various failure modes
30 April 2025
From one piece Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
We'd constantly be improving the tools and just the iterative process and the speed at which that improves products is the critical element to success in games. The slower the iteration cycle, if you make a build every week and you prove, you go through one iteration every week, you're going to be way way way worse by the end of your project than a game company that makes new stuff every day.
-
Their words
But most of the time the company that's succeeding and winning in a market is the first or second entrant there. They've just continually buoyed their success.
-
Their words
I think the big thing to realize for indie developers right now is there's massive, massive competition in every major genre, and it's very unlikely that unless you just happen to be the world's best at a particular thing that you're going to release a game in an existing highly competitive genre and win.
+ 2 more
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Their words
There's ever more pressure to rebuild society more and more around credentials. Do you have this certificate? Do you have that proof? But companies that are focused on just building great products and doing great things gravitate towards people who do the great work.
-
Their words
A lot of what they're facing isn't the challenge of learning a new art. It's friction introduced by failures of programming language design.
From one piece On what Americans know about medieval history 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I am not here to tell you that the medieval period is a specifically peaceful time, but it pales in comparison to what goes down in the early modern period, in which both the apparently beloved Renaissance and Enlightenment periods lie.
On what Americans know about medieval historygoing-medieval.com
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Their words
Clearly as well we see that the more people know about the medieval period, the more likely they are to be correct about it.
On what Americans know about medieval historygoing-medieval.com
29 April 2025
From one piece Good vs Great Animations 2 beliefs · emilkowal.ski
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Their words
Everyone’s software is good enough these days. The barriers to entry are low. To stand out, you need to make your product feel great. One way of doing that is through animations.
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korrents.com
Easing is the most important part of any animation: it can make a bad animation feel great and a great one feel bad.Their words
Easing is the most important part of any animation. It can make a bad animation feel great and a great animation feel bad. That’s why you have to know which easing to choose in a specific situation.
26 April 2025
25 April 2025
From one piece Differential Coverage for Debugging 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Buggy code usually causes outright test failures rather than being silently exercised inside tests that still pass.Their words
a passing test can still execute buggy code if the bug is data-dependent, or if the test is not sensitive to the specific mistake in the code. But a lot of the time, buggy code only triggers failures.
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korrents.com
Comparing code coverage between passing and failing test runs is a cheap, effective way to localize a bug quickly.Their words
Differential coverage is cheap to compute and display, and when it's right, it can save a lot of time.
24 April 2025
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Their words
Unfortunately, making those simple changes is infuriatingly difficult. Global meat consumption keeps rising every year. The world still wastes at least one fourth of its food.
It's Hard to Change Our Behaviorsmichaelgrunwald.substack.com
From one piece The decline in cancer mortality is about much more than smoking 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Finally, I’ll explain a deeper issue with the whole idea: we can’t neatly divide the causes of an outcome into slices that add up to 100%.
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Their words
In my view, without smoking, we probably would have seen cancer mortality decline much earlier.
23 April 2025
22 April 2025
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Their words
That's much better than current FSD, but much worse than humans or Waymo.
21 April 2025
20 April 2025
19 April 2025
From one piece Impact, agency, and taste 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
People who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once.
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korrents.com
Different people's areas of strongest judgment or taste rarely overlap much with each other.Their words
it's quite rare for different people's "zone of best taste" to overlap very much.
-
Their words
most rewrites fail and most people are over-optimistic about how long they will take
18 April 2025
17 April 2025
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korrents.com
Deploying a new technology at scale takes decades, far longer than the people building it imagine.Their words
Deployment at scale takes so much longer than anyone ever imagines.
16 April 2025
15 April 2025
From one piece What's Really Wrong With Standardized Tests 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So a lot of the problem is mere herding: If every other top engineering program is using the GRE, it’s too weird to require a different test even if the alternative test is a far superior selection mechanism.
-
Their words
Wokeness is the obvious answer. There are many lines of defense in the War Against Merit.
-
Their words
First and foremost: Perfect scores should be vanishingly rare. Instead of clumping the best candidates together, you should be able to clearly distinguish the 99th percentile from the 99.9th, 99.99th, and so on.
+ 1 more
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korrents.com
Standardised testing is a good idea badly executed: the tests in common use are the problem, not testing itself.Their words
Standardized testing is glorious, but many standardized tests royally suck.
14 April 2025
From one piece Tariffs, saving, and investment 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money.Their words
Endless lawsuits, cost-exploding contracting requirements, decades to get permits, and more bedevil any attempt to invest here.
-
Their words
But the spike in interest rates require to do this would be huge. And the trade shock will cause a sharp recession, or worse, putting even more stress on the budget. A debt crisis is likely along the way as the US finds it impossible to roll over debt.
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korrents.com
America borrowed cheaply from the world and spent it on consumption rather than investment, exactly as Greece did.Their words
In sum, spurred on by the federal government (in many ways), the US borrowed a huge amount from foreigners at very low rates, and went on a consumption binge. Sooner or later we have to pay it back, or we go though the wrenching adjustment of a debt crisis.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
The American trade deficit is foreigners choosing to invest in America, not America being cheated.Their words
this story tells us how an increase in foreign demand to save in the US rather than at home will push up the dollar, and cause the trade deficit, which is in effect how foreigners send us factories which they would rather build here than in their own countries.
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korrents.com
The right answer on trade is unilateral free trade, and the hard part is only explaining why the objections fail.Their words
Tariffs are easy: The right answer is unilateral free trade.
13 April 2025
11 April 2025
10 April 2025
8 April 2025
From one piece in which web pages are served but also fetched 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Installing Lua libraries via apt-get tends to produce more stable results than installing via luarocks.Their words
Installing via apt-get instead of luarocks will tend to get you more stable results.
in which web pages are served but also fetchedtechnomancy.us
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korrents.com
A library that skips certificate verification by default is unsafe and should not be trusted.Their words
However, luasec does not perform any certificate verification by default! This makes its out-of-the-box behavior very unsafe, and I have to recommend against using it for anything.
in which web pages are served but also fetchedtechnomancy.us
7 April 2025
6 April 2025
From one piece America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It’s the work ethic, knowhow, commitment, combined with top notch infrastructure, that makes China the most powerful manufacturing country in the world today.
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korrents.com
Building a factory in America takes at least two years before it can open, and months more before it runs well.Their words
It takes at least, in the most favorable of jurisdictions, 2 years (if you can get the permits) to build a factory in the United States.
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korrents.com
Technological capability has to be practised to be kept: a country that stops making something forgets how.Their words
The people who knew how to build and repair molds have either passed away or are long retired.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
Money cannot buy back a manufacturing capability a country has lost, because what is missing is the knowhow.Their words
Even with infinite money, we cannot duplicate that, because we lack the knowhow.
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Their words
That’s because America has an amazing consumer supply chain, one of the best, if not the best in the world, but this is totally different from having an industrial supply chain.
5 April 2025
From one piece Nonproliferation is the wrong approach to AI misuse 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
By trying to use misuse as a fig leaf for their real concerns, they end up sounding much less credible than if they just tried to argue for what they actually meant.
-
Their words
But we do not have experience with the kinds of problems we’ll face if we build machines that are smarter and more capable than us, so I feel much less sanguine that an adaptation-based strategy will help us there.
-
Their words
The current status quo—where new models that push the frontier are kept private, and openly available equivalents are only released after a lag of months or years—is valuable.
+ 2 more
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Their words
We should think of the gap between frontier models and proliferated models as an adaptation buffer: a limited time window when we know what bad actors will soon be able to use AI for, which gives us a chance to implement defensive measures that increase society’s resilience to the danger.
-
Their words
But with AI, it’s different: it’s often only a couple of years between when you need a world-class computing cluster to do something and when you can run it on a high-end gaming chip on your laptop.
4 April 2025
3 April 2025
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Usesrcmnd.app
HammerspoonTheir words
Hammerspoon: To script macOS with Lua.
-
Usesrcmnd.app
Moonlander Mk1Their words
Moonlander Mk1 keyboard (firmware config)
-
Usesrcmnd.app
Synology DS720+ NASTheir words
Synology DS720+ NAS, for backups et al
+ 2 more
-
Usesrcmnd.app
StarlinkTheir words
I also have a backup link with Starlink.
-
Usesrcmnd.app
Apple MacBook Pro 16"Their words
Apple MacBook Pro 16" - M3 Pro, 36GB, from 2023
2 April 2025
1 April 2025
-
Their words
These systems will be absolutely central to the economy, technology, and national security, and will be capable of so much autonomy that I consider it basically unacceptable for humanity to be totally ignorant of how they work.
From one piece Advice for time management as a manager 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The stereotype is that new managers often micromanage, but at Wave, I've noticed that new managers often err on the side of undermanaging, or being too hands-off, perhaps out of a desire to signal that they trust their reports.
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korrents.com
A manager's own individual technical output drops by roughly 10-20% per engineer they manage.Their words
you should expect to have something like 10-20% less individual output per engineer you manage, depending on how experienced you are, they are, etc., and with substantial week-to-week variance.
31 March 2025
30 March 2025
29 March 2025
27 March 2025
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
AbundanceTheir words
but I recommend Abundance to the Silver Bulletin audience.
-
korrents.com
The old Canada-US relationship, built on ever-deeper economic integration and tight security cooperation, is over.Their words
The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.
26 March 2025
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Their words
Even if we assume all three of these crashes were Waymo’s fault, that would still mean that a large majority of the 38 serious crashes were not Waymo’s fault.
From one piece The Idea of My New Book, The Digital Fourth Amendment—and Why It Matters 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Applying the old Fourth Amendment rules unchanged to digital evidence would gut its protection over time.Their words
Because of the way computers happen to work, sticking with the old rules would mean gutting Fourth Amendment protection over time.
-
Their words
My book argues that courts should preserve the role, not the rule—and it then shows what new specific rules should follow from that.
-
Usesrcmnd.app
iPhone 16 ProTheir words
The device I rely on for communication, entertainment, and everything in between.
-
Lovedrcmnd.app
Kindle Paperwhite, Gen 10Their words
Read Read Read. I love reading books and Kindle is my goto device for that.
-
Usesrcmnd.app
Apple Airpods ProTheir words
Music, Podcasts, Business calls, and everything else
+ 2 more
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Likedrcmnd.app
LG 29" Ultrawide Monitor - 29WL500-BTheir words
The screen that I use to code from home, it's a 21:9 aspect ratio, which is perfect for coding and watching movies.
-
Usesrcmnd.app
LG 34" Ultrawide Monitor - 34WK95C-BTheir words
My everyday office gear that helps me debug, code, write documents seamlessly.
25 March 2025
-
Their words
Say goodbye to cycles of mock and doc feedback, and say hello to code-first prototypes with constant iteration (on prompts, models, etc) to answer three key questions.
The Death of Product Development as We Know itlg.substack.com
From one piece A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
This was obviously highly automated and designed to immediately export the list before the victim could take preventative measures.
-
Their words
When I have conversations with breached companies, my messaging is crystal clear: be transparent and expeditious in your reporting of the incident and prioritise communicating with your customers.
24 March 2025
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
WhoopTheir words
Summarizing all of that into my advice right now: Get Whoop for 9.5/10, reliable, convenient sleep tracking with an excellent app (once you get to know it a bit). Get Oura for 10/10 tracking, if you're ok with the ring form factor.
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
OuraTheir words
Summarizing all of that into my advice right now: Get Whoop for 9.5/10, reliable, convenient sleep tracking with an excellent app (once you get to know it a bit). Get Oura for 10/10 tracking, if you're ok with the ring form factor.
-
Mixed onrcmnd.app
8Sleep Pod 4 UltraTheir words
I didn't find 8Sleep to be very reliable in its sleep tracking. The scores don't make as much sense to me when I wake up, and as we saw above they don't correlate very strongly with Whoop or Oura.
+ 1 more
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
AutoSleepTheir words
AutoSleep is basically a random number generator. Maybe there is a better app on Apple Watch for sleep tracking, but I haven't found it. Do not use.
23 March 2025
From one piece Superhuman's secret to success | Rahul Vohra (CEO and founder) 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
And number two, the superhuman opportunity deserves everyone who works at the company to spend as much time as possible in their zone of genius. And so that includes me as well as everybody else. So what I did is I hired a really great president. I went from eight direct reports to two.
-
Their words
But this is the hard part. When you're when you're doing that market widening, you're not solution deepening. And so your perceived product velocity may decrease. You can avoid some of these things with some smart technology decisions, but mostly you just have to grind through it and it is worth it to get to the other side.
-
Their words
you can classify anything that you build in a company into one of two categories. Solution deepening and market widening. Now solution deepening means making your product better for its existing users but not making it available to more users. Whereas market widening means making your product available to more users but not making the product itself any better.
+ 2 more
-
Their words
what is it that creates true virality? It's not viral mechanics. It's word of mouth. It is brand that this is how you can kickstart a brand.
-
Their words
we've definitely found that there are whales to use the gaming terminology that one person is going to be responsible for inviting 25, 50, 100 people
22 March 2025
From one piece ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It's like trying to find meaning in your job. You can find satisfaction in what you do. That is a very good thing. You can find satisfaction and be happy with what you've created. You can be thrilled by the experience, but you cannot find... I doubt you can find purpose.
-
korrents.com
An addiction is not ended by finding something better to put in its place; you do not stop a problem by replacing it.Their words
You don't stop a problem by replacing it. And so I didn't have a girlfriend, I didn't have all that. I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife.
-
Their words
But for me it just comes down to, is it really a good thing to do? Is it really actually something we want, is to value people in such a profane or just disregarding way? I just really think it's just bad for the soul. Even if all the stats said it was great for you, I still say it's actually bad.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
The sense that programming is mostly web programming is a social construct of Twitter, not a picture of the field.Their words
And so we often talk about programming in perspective of web, or something that's pretty narrow, and I think that's just a social construct of Twitter more than anything else, that actually I don't believe it's that representative of the entire programming world out there.
-
Their words
And for me, that is the worst part about programming, is when you already know the solution and it's just a matter of how fast you can type and get it out from your head to your hands.
From one piece Post 50: Good Research Takes are Not Sufficient for Good Strategic Takes 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
People's opinions are shaped more by who they talk to most than by what is actually true.Their words
Though note that people's opinions are often substantially reflections of the people they speak to most, rather than what's actually true.
-
korrents.com
A strong track record in a technical field is only weak evidence that someone has good strategic judgment about AGI.Their words
Having a good research track record is some evidence of good big-picture takes about AGI, but it's weak evidence.
21 March 2025
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
A Field Guide to Getting LostTheir words
A series of autobiographical essays exploring wandering, uncertainty, memory, desire, and place—embracing the unknown as a gateway to self-transcendence.
-
Their words
Ben's personal reflections on reinventing himself at "midlife" (though relatable at any age). I love how he leaned into a new version of himself without dramatically blowing up his life.
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
Dirtbag Rich: High Freedom, Low Income, Deep PurposeTheir words
This book is a short but inspiring take on living life on your terms while being pragmatic about money and how to make it happen. Reminds me of a less travel-centric Vagabonding.
+ 2 more
-
Their words
Part memoir, part raw, honest reflection, part useful ideas for a pathless life. I loved how this book didn't follow a non-fiction formula. His 'on-season'/'off-season' approach was useful for me.
-
Recommendsrcmnd.app
Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your TwentiesTheir words
Fantastic memoir of figuring it out in your twenties and alternatives to blindly pursuing the default path.
20 March 2025
-
Their words
UX design has been steadily improving over the last 50 years and is now reasonably good. The low-hanging fruit of terrible usability has long since been picked.
Declining ROI From UX Design Workjakobnielsenphd.substack.com
19 March 2025
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Usesrcmnd.app
Apple NotesTheir words
I maintain one single text note in the Apple Notes app just called "notes".
17 March 2025
16 March 2025
13 March 2025
-
Their words
The new trend toward vibe coding and vibe design may be upending the user-centered design paradigm that has remained based on the same ideology since the first UX design projects at Bell Labs, starting in 1947.
12 March 2025
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korrents.com
Funding education does not make a country rich; being rich is what makes a country fund education lavishly.Their words
Lavishly funding education doesn’t cause countries to become rich; being rich causes countries to lavishly fund education.
-
Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Decent Espresso dimples and freckles shower screensTheir words
Decent Espresso has done it again. This time, they've revolutionized shower screens.
-
Their words, before
Now that we have the answers, it all looks very obvious, and mostly straightforward.
Their words now
I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year, and I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn’t see what should have been very clear to me from the start.
11 March 2025
10 March 2025
9 March 2025
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Their words
This is why I think that The Siren’s Call is a very important book.
From one piece Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
However, with so many different software projects out there, each moving so rapidly and depending on and being used by so many other projects, it becomes practically-inevitable that some regressions "like that one" happen, almost constantly.
-
Their words
It's easy to get impressive-looking results if you're comparing against a poorly-tuned baseline, and that observation turns out to explain a surprising fraction of supposed improvements.
7 March 2025
From one piece Vibe Coding and Vibe Design 2 beliefs · jakobnielsenphd.substack.com
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Their words
Essentially, vibe coding makes it trivial to create front-end code, so designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works.
-
Their words
In a vibe coding future, companies will hopefully invest more in understanding user needs, refining the interface, and polishing details that delight users, because those are harder for AI to get right without guidance.
6 March 2025
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Their words
Making ultra cheap products requires different rules and strategy.
5 March 2025
4 March 2025
-
Their words, before
Es ist in der nahe liegenden Zukunft ausgeschlossen, dass wir die Schuldenbremse reformieren.
Their words now
Angesichts der Bedrohungen unserer Freiheit und des Friedens auf unserem Kontinent muss jetzt auch für unsere Verteidigung gelten: Whatever it takes.
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Likedrcmnd.app
How to Feed the WorldTheir words
How to Feed the World had a lot to teach me—and I’m sure it will teach you a lot, too.
2 March 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Claude 3.7 SonnetTheir words
As a Python and JavaScript programmer my favorite models right now are Claude 3.7 Sonnet with thinking turned on, OpenAI’s o3-mini-high and GPT-4o with Code Interpreter (for Python).
1 March 2025
28 February 2025
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Their words
But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg's dictum to "move fast and break things" and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else.
27 February 2025
25 February 2025
23 February 2025
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Likedrcmnd.app
Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment ResistanceTheir words
(publication date March 18, 2025, Viking) by Laura Delano is a compelling and troubling memoir of psychiatric patienthood, iatrogenic harm, and finding a meaningful and flourishing life outside of the mental healthcare system.
20 February 2025
19 February 2025
18 February 2025
16 February 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Real-time sync enginesTheir words
there’s also a great post on sync engines by Adam Nyberg
14 February 2025
13 February 2025
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korrents.com
Treating errors generically is a mistake that leads to fragile software, poor observability and worse experiences.Their words
This is what leads to slop JS/TS software. Treating errors generically like this is a mistake. It leads to fragile software, poor telemetry/observability/debugging, and as a result worse experiences
12 February 2025
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On changing their mind
As I set out last time, the usual story — that this was caused by deforestation, making firewood so scarce that people resorted to burning an inferior but cheaper fuel — simply does not stack up.
From one piece Age of Invention: How Coal Really Won 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
England’s deforestation — along with the draining of its peat-filled fens and marshes, and the clearing of its gorse-growing heaths — was instead itself caused by the arrival of cheap coal.
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Their words
Far from being the laboratory that brought coal into the home, then, London was actually a laggard — all the more so given it had been buying coal from Newcastle for centuries.
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Their words
Many people assume that they need to keep their jobs forever, because it is their source of health insurance. The good news is, this is usually not true.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
PeddleTheir words
I recently used Peddle with great results, and have been recommending them to anyone who has a low-value, possibly even non-driveable car they just want GONE in exchange for $500-1000 of cash.
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Usesaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
SafecoTheir words
So I switched to Safeco, and so far rates have been stable. I am paying about $500 per year for a $275,000 rebuild coverage with $5k deductible.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
BluehostTheir words
But until you reach that first million, Bluehost is a great choice.
+ 2 more
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Usesaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
PantheonTheir words
Nowadays with over 6 million pageviews per month, we have moved up to the Uber-powerful development/hosting combo platform called Pantheon.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
CourseraTheir words
Coursera: actual courses from various universities, made available mostly free
11 February 2025
10 February 2025
9 February 2025
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korrents.com
People will find new kinds of useful work as AI advances, though it will not resemble the jobs of today.Their words
We will find new things to do, new ways to be useful to each other, and new ways to compete, but they may not look very much like the jobs of today.
7 February 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Shout wipesTheir words
For a spot remover, bring a few Shout wipes or a dab of Goop grease remover in a small plastic container.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Goop grease removerTheir words
For a spot remover, bring a few Shout wipes or a dab of Goop grease remover in a small plastic container.
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Money beltTheir words
Money belt. This flat, hidden, zippered pouch — worn around your waist and tucked under your clothes — is essential for the peace of mind it brings.
+ 2 more
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Small day packTheir words
Small day pack. A lightweight pack is great for carrying a sweater, camera, guidebook, and picnic goodies while you leave your large bag (with most of your belongings) at the hotel.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Olay's Daily Facials 5-in-1Their words
Disposable washcloths that pack dry but lather up when wet (such as Olay's Daily Facials 5-in-1) are another option; cut them in half to make them last longer.
6 February 2025
5 February 2025
4 February 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Progressive MythsTheir words
I recently interviewed Mike Huemer on his new Progressive Myths. To repeat, I consider it “the best book on wokeness.” You know you’re reading a special book by page 3
3 February 2025
From one piece DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Arizona is a paperweight. If Hsinchu disappeared off the face of the planet, within a year, couple years, Arizona would stop producing too.
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Their words
China, if they wanted to build the largest data center in the world, if they had access to the chips, could. So it's just a question of when, not if.
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Their words
if you believe we're in this sort of stage of economic growth and change that we've been in for the last 20 years, the export controls are absolutely guaranteeing that China will win long-term.
+ 2 more
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Their words
To some extent, training a model does effectively nothing. They have a model. The thing that Dario is sort of speaking to is the implementation of that model, once trained to then create huge economic growth, huge increases in military capabilities, huge increases in productivity of people, betterment of lives.
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Their words
I think it's even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, "Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model." That is truly YOLO.
From one piece DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
There's not many worlds where China cannot train AI models. I think export controls are decapping the amount of compute or the density of compute that China can have.
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Their words
Accepted practice is that for any given model that is a notable advancement, you're going to do two to 4x compute of the full training run in experiments alone.
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Their words
This is why you want to work in post-training because the GPU cost for training is lower. So you can make a higher percentage of your training runs YOLO runs.
+ 2 more
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Their words
The scale word gets a lot of attention in this. The interpretation that I use is effectively to avoid adding the human priors to your learning process. And if you read the original essay, this is what it talks about is how researchers will try to come up with clever solutions to their specific problem that might get them small gains in the short term while simply enabling these deep learning systems to work efficiently, and for these bigger problems in the long term might be more likely to scale and continue to drive success.
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Their words
And we'll get into the details of the models and again and again as we try to get deeper into how the models were trained, we will say things like the data processing, data filtering data quality is the number one determinant of the model quality.
2 February 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Truth MachineTheir words
The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, The Sovereign Individual, The Truth Machine, Daemon
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
DaemonTheir words
The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, The Sovereign Individual, The Truth Machine, Daemon
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Communistic Societies of the United StatesTheir words
Communistic Societies of the United States, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, The Network State
+ 2 more
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Significance of the Frontier in American HistoryTheir words
Communistic Societies of the United States, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, The Network State
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
The Network StateTheir words
Communistic Societies of the United States, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, The Network State
30 January 2025
29 January 2025
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Their words
And so, while the Jevons paradox case was 100% correct in the long run, 97% of the fiber laid in 2001 was unlit.
From one piece From the vault: Why housing shortages cause homelessness 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The American cities with the highest housing prices have the worst homelessness problems.
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Their words
Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.
28 January 2025
27 January 2025
25 January 2025
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Likedrcmnd.app
Roll Back the World: A Sister’s MemoirTheir words
Deborah Kasdan’s Roll Back the World: A Sister’s Memoir (2023) is an honest and vulnerable account of her sister Rachel’s life with schizophrenia and the challenges this presented for the family.
24 January 2025
From one piece Should we control AI instead of aligning it? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
However, without having a good handle on elicitation, we cannot be confident that our control techniques are effective.
Should we control AI instead of aligning it?aligned.substack.com
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Their words
More generally, we should actually solve alignment instead of just trying to control misaligned AI.
Should we control AI instead of aligning it?aligned.substack.com
23 January 2025
21 January 2025
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On changing their mind
Having fallen into the East Asia - Africa Trap before, I can tell you precisely why so many people make this mistake.
20 January 2025
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korrents.com
A country should raise revenue by tariffing foreign countries rather than by taxing its own citizens.Their words
Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.
17 January 2025
16 January 2025
15 January 2025
14 January 2025
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