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Lovedrcmnd.app
Waste BooksTheir words
Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.
What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it; tap a face for their feed.
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3 September 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
EnsorcelledTheir words
Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper is genius. It’s a unique format that can be read in one setting. The writing is beautiful.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Night SlayerTheir words
George would write an epic YA coming-of-age fantasy series that moves faster than the Percy Jackson books
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Lovedrcmnd.app
City on the EdgeTheir words
It’s fantastic and is going to be a powerful and definitive story of San Francisco from 1990 to the present day.
2 September 2025
From one piece Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evans 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
film was this high margin product where they had a bunch of unique intellectual property and digital cameras are a low margin um commodity where they were competing with the entire consumer electronics industry with no differentiation.
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Their words
I think it's actually the opposite which is that everyone's kind of using the same data which is you need such an enormous amount of generalized text that the amount that Google has or that meta has is not actually enough to move to be a kind of fundamental difference in what you can train with.
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korrents.com
Incumbents have looked unbeatable at the start of every previous platform shift and have still lost.Their words
I'm pretty sure people thought Microsoft had an advantage on the internet and Google and um Meta had an advantage on mobile and everyone thought IBM was going to win PCs. Like once IBM made a PC, that was it. It's all over now. And we kind of forget that like there were PCs before and then IBM made one and that kind of became the standard but then IBM lost it.
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korrents.com
Being certain a technology matters tells you almost nothing about where its value will end up being captured.Their words
It wasn't clear that the browser wasn't where the value capture was cuz Microsoft crowbarred its way into dominance in browsers but that turned out not to matter and then all the value is in search advertising and social which were 5 years later and 10 years later and so like you can be very very clear that this is the thing and then still be completely unclear how it's going to work.
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Their words
My sort of base case is to say this is kind of another platform shift and all the new stuff will be built around this for the next 10 or 15 years and then there'll be something else and so the impact on employment will be kind of like the impact on employment from the other platform shifts
1 September 2025
From one piece One Size Does Not Fit All 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A major new interface redesign takes roughly a year of refinement before it looks presentable.Their words
Liquid Glass is currently in a barely presentable state on iOS. It's going to be like iOS 7 and take another year to sand down the rough edges.
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korrents.com
A single interface design should not be applied uniformly across phone, tablet, watch, TV, and desktop.Their words
The bottom line is that one size does not fit all: we don't want a Mac that looks or works like a phone, tablet, watch, or TV.
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korrents.com
Tablets will not replace desktop computers for complex, resource-intensive professional work.Their words
So while iPadOS has obviously gotten more capable, I don't see it displacing the Mac desktop as the place where the heavy lifting gets done.
From one piece Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Shipping a half-baked product permanently damages customer trust, even after it is later fixed.Their words
When AWS ships a service which is half-baked, it diminishes customer trust in AWS as a whole; even if the problems in that service ultimately get corrected (either by fixing them or in some cases by simply getting rid of a service which should never have existed in the first place) the memory of a failed launch will live on in customers' minds for years to come.
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Their words
While the same does not directly apply in other fields, working with others to produce the best results for everyone will be much better in the long-term than focusing solely on what Amazon needs right now.
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korrents.com
Listening to customers is invaluable, but you should not build the thing they asked you for.Their words
Customer Obsession is great, but I often see Amazonians taking this too simplistically: "Start with the customer" doesn't have to mean "ask customers what they want and then give them faster horses".
30 August 2025
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korrents.com
American data centres consume about 66 million gallons of water a day, a small fraction of what they withdraw.Their words, before
Taking this into account, actual water consumed by data centers is around 66 million gallons per day.
Their words now
So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption.
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Their words
However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption.
I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumptionconstruction-physics.com
29 August 2025
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Likedrcmnd.app
Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of NeoliberalismTheir words
As Quinn Slobodian documents in his excellent book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
From one piece Historical trajectories of local government in India and China 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Competition and experimentation among local officials has been a major driver of China's economic growth.Their words
China does much better in basic service delivery-and its local governments have also played a very obvious and important in driving growth, thanks to the competition and experimentation among local officials driven to develop their jurisdictions.
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korrents.com
China's stronger local-level state capacity than India's helps explain their diverging long-run economic performance.Their words
On this measure, state capacity at the local level looks much stronger in China than in India, which helps explain some of the long-running economic differences between them.
28 August 2025
From one piece Chat is: the Future or a Terrible UI 2 beliefs · lukew.com
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Their words
Language is a terrible way to describe visual, spatial, and temporal things.
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Their words
It's also worth noting that chat isn't the only way to integrate AI in software products and increasingly agent-based applications outperform chat-only solutions. So expect things to keep changing.
27 August 2025
From one piece Megapapers and How to Write Them 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think that changing societal outcome requires changing minds, and the "heft" that comes from many authors with different backgrounds endorsing a certain set of conclusions is hard to replicate with a link to a shared ChatGPT chat.
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Their words
But they can't do everything that megapapers do, such as conveying intellectual heft and legitimacy, and they are not yet a replacement for real, diverse experts.
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korrents.com
AI is becoming capable of synthesizing knowledge, one of the core functions megapapers serve.Their words
AI is increasingly adept at directly achieving some goals that megapapers help to achieve, such as synthesizing knowledge.
From one piece How to survive a TikTok hit song 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It's very relatable; the internet is so toxic but we kind of have no choice but to interact with it if we want to be heard as musicians / writers / artists / citizens.
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Their words
The band told me about the pressure of creating content in order to promote their music and the ways in which the audience now has power over how songs sound.
26 August 2025
25 August 2025
From one piece My Current AI Dev Workflow 3 beliefs · steipete.me
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Their words
Still don’t see how this could be moved to background agents. I steer the models a lot as I notice them drifting off - that’s much harder if they run in the background.
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Their words
Bigger changes always get tests. Automated ones usually aren’t great, but the model almost always finds issues when you ask it to write tests IN THE SAME CONTEXT. Context is precious, don’t waste it.
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Their words
Even removed my last MCP, since Claude sometimes would go off spinning up Playwright unasked when it could simply read the code - which is faster and pollutes the context less.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
GeminiTheir words
so using it less and less. GPT-5 for reviewing plans works even better than Gemini.
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Usesrcmnd.app
VercelTheir words
Pick services that have CLIs: vercel, psql, gh, axiom.
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Usesrcmnd.app
AxiomTheir words
Pick services that have CLIs: vercel, psql, gh, axiom.
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Usesrcmnd.app
GitHub CLITheir words
Pick services that have CLIs: vercel, psql, gh, axiom.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Dell UltraSharp U4025QWTheir words
3840x1620 makes 4 Claude instances + Chrome all visible without moving windows.
23 August 2025
22 August 2025
From one piece The Rumpelstiltskin effect: therapeutic repercussions of clinical diagnosis (with 1 co-authors) 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Likewise, self-diagnosis should be understood as an attempt to secure the therapeutic effect of a medical intervention to which patients do not have official access.
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korrents.com
Diagnoses that have therapeutic effects are medical interventions and should be treated and researched as such.Their words
If a clinical diagnosis can have a therapeutic effect, then, at least in some instances, diagnoses are medical interventions in themselves and ought to be treated and researched as such, with an eye to both positive effects and potential iatrogenic harms.
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korrents.com
Clinical diagnosis can have a therapeutic effect independent of any other intervention.Their words
Their experiences highlight a striking, neglected and unchristened medical phenomenon: The therapeutic effect of a clinical diagnosis, independent of any other intervention, where clinical diagnosis refers to situating the person's experiences into a clinical category by a clinician or the patient.
21 August 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The WeightTheir words
The Weight is Mellia Mendes's award-winning webcomic, now collected in a massive, beautifully made graphic novel from Drawn & Quarterly. It will tear your heart out, it will send you to a dreamy world of pastoral utopianism, then it will tear your heart out.
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Their words
Years of reform mean that almost everyone who can be diverted from Rikers already is.
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Their words, before
I suspect that if you decided to be open-minded, then the Being would probably be extremely persuasive. But I don’t think it’s very common to do that.
Their words now
I take it back. Instead of being unsure, I now lean strongly towards the idea that the Being would in fact be very good at convincing people of stuff, and far better than any human.
20 August 2025
From one piece Labubus and the brainrot aesthetic 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Any pretense of the pure or organic is undercut by a kind of willful alchemy; everything is an admixture.
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Their words
I think this slop-adjacent realm of dupe products and Instagrammable potions points to our increasingly desperate need to manipulate our own images, and an acceptance of the fact that we're kind of hybridized monsters ourselves in this post-A.I. human-machine moment
19 August 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the FutureTheir words
Dan Wang suggests in his fantastic forthcoming book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
From one piece MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29) 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
My model is that research requires a mix of skills. The day-to-day coding and execution is crucial. But there's also a set of harder-to-learn conceptual skills, collectively called research taste. These skills take a long time to gain because they have poor feedback loops, but they take very little time to use.
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Their words
I'm more agnostic about the best techniques, things like sparse autoencoders are a useful tool, but easy to waste effort using when a simpler method is sufficient or better - start by doing the obvious thing!
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Their words
I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Lessons in Magic and DisasterTheir words
Charlie Jane Anders' Lessons in Magic and Disaster drops today: it's a novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. It's my kind of novel!
18 August 2025
From one piece How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor) [ACQ2] 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I don't think all parts of the economy can absorb intelligence equally. So let's just say we develop fairly generalized super intelligence. I always use the analogy like you can invent a lot of drugs, but if clinical trials still take a long time, you're not necessarily going to get new therapies rapidly.
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Their words
I just think about like really simple things like access to mental health care, access to education, access to medical advice, access to legal advice. We're essentially taking expertise and making it a commodity. And I think that will is generally democratizing.
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Their words
if you tell what what jobs are most likely to be automated with the current generation of technology, you would probably put software engineering right at the top. The people building this technology or building the technology that is disrupting their own profession.
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Their words
If you look at the S&P 500 now and you look at the amount of value from companies created in that, one could argue that actually almost all of the exuberance and hype was totally warranted and it in fact did change commerce in fundamental ways.
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Their words
So when you make something like chat GPT, you can go from to zero to 100 million users faster than any technology in history because of the other technologies though. like you couldn't have gotten there if not for the build out of the internet, if not for the smartphone.
From one piece How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor) [ACQ2] 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Neither seats nor tokens can price an agent, because neither of them measures whether the job got done.Their words
Seat based. Well, what is a seat? That doesn't make any sense. Consumption where it's like is it per message? Is it per token? Is it per conversation? And none of these things actually mapped very well to getting a job done and getting a job done well.
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Their words
And in contrast to software as a service or software you'd buy off a shelf at, you know, Fry Electronics, you know, decades ago, which might help you be marginally more productive, help you get a job done. Agents, in contrast, are actually getting the job done for you. And so you're in essence hiring software to accomplish a task and get it done well.
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Their words
And it came back and half of them were great, a quarter of them were total garbage and a quarter needed some work. But like it was, you know, in a way him working the entire weekend with, you know, guidance from him.
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korrents.com
AI agents can already resolve more than eighty per cent of a company's incoming customer issues.Their words
One of the first was we had a bet as to what percent of kind of all incoming customer issues one of our agents could resolve. And Brett was maybe the pessimist and realist favorably charitably. And I bet we'd exceed 80% by the end of the year and we did.
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Their words
Brett and I like betting and one of the bets we have is the year in which greater than 50% of conversations with agents built on Sierra are with people's personal agents. So agents talking to agents.
17 August 2025
15 August 2025
From one piece China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And I think the United States could probably do that in 2 years or less if you started today. Like it's currently 11:00, so like we're going to start cutting checks by noon.
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Their words
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
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Their words
I would never like hold up a flag saying I'm really good at building highspeed trains. Like that is just a sign that you're really bad at capital allocation.
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Their words
It absolutely asymmetrically helps China. We're not currently working with China. They don't plan to, but like the physics is very obvious, you know, and synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years.
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Their words
China is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.
14 August 2025
13 August 2025
From one piece Open Banking and payments competition 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Letting banks ruin the economics of businesses they dislike by demand letter will inevitably be abused.Their words
We should not allow banks to get into the habit of sending demand letters to ruin the economics of businesses they simply do not like.
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Their words
But cards are not and cannot be the last word in payments.
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korrents.com
Having banked almost everyone does not entitle banks to a fee on every transaction in society.Their words
We have made enormous strides, both from the financial industry and civil society, in banking almost everyone.
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Their words
Almost all discussions of it center on “data”, but it’s actually a fight about payments, and whether banks have a right to monopolize and charge for all economic activity their users engage in, irrespective of whether the bank operates the payment method.
From one piece Keyu Jin: China's Economy, Tariffs, Trade, Trump, Communism & Capitalism | Lex Fridman Podcast #477 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Do you want technological supremacy and radical breakthroughs? Well, yes. If you do, then you have to tolerate that there are going to be some people who are just going to be uncomfortably rich, like in the United States. You can’t say that you detest the financial system for its greed, but then not accept the fact that it is what fuels innovation, right?
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Their words
Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data.
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Their words
I say now that China’s biggest challenge is consumption, it’s not production. We know that China’s very, very competitive in production and supply. China needs to be a consuming country to be a rich country.
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Their words
I’ve rarely seen a more capitalist society than China, from the pure economic side. I’ve rarely seen companies that are as competitive as Chinese companies. People as ambitious and obsessed with making money as Chinese people. Kind of ruthless actually. And look, consumers shop, firms invest. If you invest well financially, you’ll get great returns. What is not capitalistic about the Chinese economy? At the same time, the social fabric is highly socialist.
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Their words
The biggest misunderstanding is somehow that a group of people or even just one person runs the entire Chinese economy. It is far from the reality. It is a very complex, large economy, and even if there is an extreme form of political centralization, the economy is totally decentralized.
From one piece Who believes in China’s output gap? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But for a variety of reasons I think it makes more sense to stay agnostic about forecasts of potential GDP growth, and focus more on the signals the current performance of the economy is sending.
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korrents.com
China faces a genuine, sizable output gap right now, not just a lower structural growth ceiling.Their words
I'm with the markets here: I believe in the output gap. The structural slowdown of the Chinese economy is an incredibly consensus view, and I believe in it too.
12 August 2025
11 August 2025
9 August 2025
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Their words
One of my favorite papers about prompt injection is Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections
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Likedrcmnd.app
Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi GermanyTheir words
However, after reading a few pages my original inhibitions were overturned and I bought the book.
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Their words
People had grown to expect miracles, but GPT-5 is just the latest incremental advance.
8 August 2025
7 August 2025
6 August 2025
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Usesrcmnd.app
Arc BrowserTheir words
Arc Browser: I tried Kagi but too many apps are incompatible with Safari so RIP. set to default.
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Likedrcmnd.app
BeeperTheir words
the super messaging app. https://www.beeper.com/download (i know founder)
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
podmanTheir words
podman instead of docker https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137525
5 August 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Concept of RepresentationTheir words
But they are in part supported by one of the great books of modern political theory, Hanna Pitkin’s The Concept of Representation
4 August 2025
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.
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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.
-
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.
+ 2 more
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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.
-
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.
+ 2 more
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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.
-
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.
+ 2 more
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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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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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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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
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.
-
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.
+ 2 more
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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.
-
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.
+ 2 more
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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
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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.
+ 2 more
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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? 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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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.
-
Their words
And good luck getting to “alignment” or “safety” without reliabilty.
-
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.
+ 1 more
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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.
-
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.
-
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.
+ 2 more
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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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Their words
There is everything to play for, and we can still all come out better off.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
+ 2 more
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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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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
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
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
4 May 2025
1 May 2025
From one piece Why We Think 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
model CoTs could be biased due to lack of explicit training objectives aimed at encouraging faithful reasoning
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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%.
-
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.
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Their words
Wokeness is the obvious answer. There are many lines of defense in the War Against Merit.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Usesrcmnd.app
Moonlander Mk1Their words
Moonlander Mk1 keyboard (firmware config)
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Usesrcmnd.app
Synology DS720+ NASTheir words
Synology DS720+ NAS, for backups et al
+ 2 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
StarlinkTheir words
I also have a backup link with Starlink.
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Usesrcmnd.app
Apple MacBook Pro 16"Their words
Apple MacBook Pro 16" - M3 Pro, 36GB, from 2023
2 April 2025
1 April 2025
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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
27 March 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
AbundanceTheir words
but I recommend Abundance to the Silver Bulletin audience.
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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.
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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.
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Usesrcmnd.app
iPhone 16 ProTheir words
The device I rely on for communication, entertainment, and everything in between.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Kindle Paperwhite, Gen 10Their words
Read Read Read. I love reading books and Kindle is my goto device for that.
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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.
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Usesrcmnd.app
LG 34" Ultrawide Monitor - 34WK95C-BTheir words
My everyday office gear that helps me debug, code, write documents seamlessly.
25 March 2025
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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What is a korrent?
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