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.
My go-to languages are TypeScript for web stuff, Go for CLIs and Swift if it needs to use macOS stuff or has UI. Go wasn’t something I gave even the slightest thought even a few months ago, but eventually I played around and found that agents are really great at writing it, and its simple type system makes linting fast.
Swift’s build infra is good enough for most things these days. codex knows how to run iOS apps and how to deal with the Simulator. No special stuff or MCPs needed.
This amazing book traces the development of genetic engineering, and how Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson turned the science into a commercial product by developing recombinant insulin.
I mistakenly expected this to be a somewhat shallow, generic popular science book, but it was a very thorough account of how CRISPR gene editing emerged from decades of obscure basic research into bacterial immune systems.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach is a beautiful fable about a seagull who wants to fly for the pure joy of flight, rather than simply to find food, as most gulls do. Ostracized from his flock for his eccentric behavior, Jonathan embarks on a quest for aerodynamic perfection that doubles as a moving spiritual allegory. You've never read a book quite like this one before, and it'll stick with you long after you reach the end.
Breakneck by Dan Wang takes you on a fascinating journey through China's engineering state, juxtaposing it against America's lawyerly society in an effort to reveal what each country should learn from the other. I've been a keen reader of Dan's personal blog for many years and am delighted to report that this book, his first, features everything I love most about his writing: his unbounded curiosity, thoughtful analysis, compelling storytelling, self-awareness, offbeat sense of humor, and insights born of lived experience.
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is a surprisingly weird and weirdly underrated novel given how many copies it sold and the popularity of the blockbuster franchise it spawned. The story weaves together many apparently disparate threads and there are extensive speculative digressions into the biotechnology, business interests, and institutional dynamics that make the park possible and its dissolution inevitable. If the movie is supremely entertaining, the book is supremely thought-provoking.
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm is a mind-bending psychological thriller about a secret agency tasked with fighting dangerous "antimemes"—ideas that refuse to be remembered. Plenty of stories start with a clever high-concept premise and just let it play out. This one pushes its premise to extremes I never imagined possible, ratcheting up an astonishing amount of tension along the way.
And just like with social media, we're very easily affected by the bombardment of small pieces every single day, without realizing how bad it is for us.
It wasn't my favorite, but it was very different. Like eating food that tastes nothing like what you're used to. For that reason alone, I'd recommend it.
America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.
Best books I read in 2025: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of story to motivate and persuade by Will Storr
Best books I read in 2025: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of story to motivate and persuade by Will Storr Bringing Up Baby: An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics by Paul Turke
Best books I read in 2025: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of story to motivate and persuade by Will Storr Bringing Up Baby: An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics by Paul Turke Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier
A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.
A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia.
Notting Hill, in addition to being just a lovely little romantic comedy about two people from entirely mismatched stations in life, trying to negotiate a space in the world they might get to call their own, is one of the best films out there showing at least a little bit of what it’s like to be famous to everyone, everywhere, all the time, forever and ever, amen.
Someone recommended this book after my brother passed away. I didn’t want to read a bunch of books about grief, but this one struck a chord. I wish I had read it before he died.
Good Material by Dolly Alderton A simple story about a struggling stand-up comedian going through a difficult break-up. A funny, sweet book. I enjoyed it.
This book manages to pull all of that together in a way that's genuinely readable and engaging, helped along by anecdotes from his own policymaking experience that both clarify the arguments and make them feel concrete and accessible to a much broader audience.
It's powerful because it's simple without being simplistic and, like Rogoff's book, is interspersed with engaging personal stories that deepen the substantive argument.
It had the best opening sentence of any nonfiction book I read this year: "In 2012, 146 million children were born. That was more than in any prior year. It was also more than in any year since. Millions fewer will be born this year. The year 2012 may well turn out to be the year in which the most humans were ever born—ever as in ever for as long as humanity exists." Such a simple and obvious fact but I had not known it before. I had to keep reading.
I first read it in college and recently, as we approach this milestone, decided to re-read it and was amazed about how fresh and vivid it felt, as well as how nuanced and humane it is.
I have thought a number of films have been riotously funny, but only A Fish Called Wanda made me laugh so hard that I was in very real danger of pissing myself right there in the movie theater.
Mac Mini M4 (16/256GB): I found it very value for money. It's also my first device from Apple and I'm very satisfied using it as a personal computer at home.
Macbook Air M4 (16/256GB): daily driver. Get things done. It's also my second device from Apple and I'm very satisfied using it as a mobility solution.
2025 is where I (and I think the rest of the industry also) first started to internalize the "shape" of LLM intelligence in a more intuitive sense. We're not "evolving/growing animals", we are "summoning ghosts".
Claude Code (CC) emerged as the first convincing demonstration of what an LLM Agent looks like - something that in a loopy way strings together tool use and reasoning for extended problem solving.
Hey! There’s a novel called Starship Troopers! It’s pretty good! Coincidentally and unrelated, there’s a movie called Starship Troopers! It’s also pretty good! Not the same, but pretty good.
Not every plank in his argument is convincing, and the research has evolved since the book first came out a decade ago, but the ambition is impressive and the framework holds up.
The causes and meaning of those events have been debated ever since, and Sides delivers a careful, sympathetic and engaging account of the entirety of Cook's final expedition.
I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each each book feels like another startup and that I've got to go out and make it happen almost as if I've not written one.
That's a really intelligent way place to land because what they will do is woo you with their enthusiasm and then take you down a rabbit hole where you will spend years of your life and have nothing to show.
They learn to trust you that if you're interested, they'll be interested. That what in fact what they're buying into is not the subject, but your interest in the subject.
you grab the listener like I try to grab a reader and get them to the state of mind where they'll let you take them anywhere uh and teach them about stuff that they don't even know they want to learn about.
This is Spinal Tap offers a lot of joy. It is one of the funniest movies ever made, a movie that can make you laugh until you cry, and also, make you laugh even if you have been crying.
See's Bridge Mix. My parents had this at their house when we visited in January and we've been buying them throughout the year whenever we come across a See's. The best box to have around the house.
Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits (in Milk Caramel Sea Salt and Cookie Mix), which single-handedly got me through this work year. I shudder to think how many bags of these I ate, but I can barely finish an essay without one.
Full disclosure, I got these for free, but have become unexpectedly obsessed. I wear them constantly and really like how they instantly change the mood of an outfit. Can't really say why they stand out since they're pretty basic but people ask me about them all the time.
It's a beautiful sweater and 100% wool. So far they're pilling a little (to be expected), so I'll definitely be checking in on this one next year. That price is hard to trust.
But Amap is great! Especially since it can be used in English and I think it transliterates your searches to Chinese and the Chinese place names back to English
But actually, that argument is utterly, utterly fallacious, because the process of evolution is stymied left, right, and center by inertia. Inertia is nearly as strong as evolution, and this is something that the people who talk about progress and ideas have no idea about.
And it’s obvious, it’s obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can’t just have had inscribed stone seals, and many parts of India today write on palm leaf.
And my hunch is that the archaeological evidence that we have on this score is ultimately misleading, because I think this: that probably for a very, very long time before the Sumerians, people in the world, the world of what we call the Middle East, were in contact.
And once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, that’s the crucial thing, that a picture of a foot not only meant foot but it meant the sound of the word for foot.
Good Hang with Amy Poehler: I think this is a wildly popular one now for a reason, it's very fun and I just love how it's chill and mostly comedians hanging out.
Overcommitted: Put simply, thoughtful tech conversations from thoughtful tech people. I'm biased towards this one because it's run by some coworkers, but they are awesome coworkers and it's fun and interesting!
VeggieTales Podcast: Okay this is more for my children than me, but it's a good one for talking about how it's important to be "nice" and stuff (what a concept), and it's been great on roadtrips to visit family!
The US has a lot to learn from other countries for how to catch up to the efficient frontier, especially for certain types of construction (ie: transit) and in certain places in the country (ie: expensive coastal metros).
Sweden, for instance, is often praised for its high adoption of prefabricated construction, but since the 1990s Sweden has had roughly flat construction labor productivity, even as it has made more extensive use of prefabrication.
The goal is not perfect enforcement. Some kids will still find workarounds. The goal is to shift the environment so children are not pressured into digital spaces they don’t want, simply to avoid being left out.
With so many professional money managers afraid to act, with most of the public in the grip of fear and anger, you should put your cash and your courage to work.
I know that this is a contested idea, but my favorite books of the last five years have all been books of criticism, so...I mean, it's literature to me!
probably 50% of the time, I would advise to a client, take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center. Pay the people too much. Get the best practitioners.
the dorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one. You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel. There are loads and loads of value creation components to that dorman which aren't captured in the open the door definition.
But when you pursue efficiency generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors and of course in the process you disregard psychological factors where the greater gains may be found and so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation.
When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making along with their running dog lackey in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very very distant from what your real world customers really care about.
people don't decide like that at the very least you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison.
Nippon Kodo Mori-no-KOH incense. I love this! Incredible bang for your buck, the little box feels so fancy, it smells insane. I'm burning it right now as I write.
COLOR WOW Raise the Root spray. I found out about this on TikTok. I spray when damp and it DOES give my flat Asian hair volume. I don't know how it works, but it does.
There can be no way to participate fully in the potential benefits from the new technology without being exposed to the losses that will arise if the enthusiasm and thus investors’ behavior prove to have been excessive.
There’s a consistent history of transformational technologies generating excessive enthusiasm and investment, resulting in more infrastructure than is needed and asset prices that prove to have been too high. The excesses accelerate the adoption of the technology in a way that wouldn’t occur in their absence.
we will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.
Their words now
Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
While heat pumps can achieve higher efficiency, consumer uptake has been much lower than expected because fundamentally, a heat pump is a 20 year bet on future power prices that most homeowners are unwilling to make.
On the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.
Because when you believe in something, when you become obsessed with something, you sacrifice yourself to it. And that sacrifice actually feels like pain and stress and doubt. Not fun.
ChatGPT, in particular, seemed to just want to validate me, tell me how great I was, reinforce any bad beliefs I might have had, and avoid saying anything uncomfortable.
investors at many tech companies, including most on the large cap list, have given up their corporate governance rights, often voluntarily (through the acceptance of shares with different voting rights), to founders and top management in these companies
I think that the pathway that you would need (in terms of revenue growth and profitability) to justify Nvidia's and OpenAI's current pricing is improbable, but that is just my view
the delusion comes from the reality that if you aggregated these breakeven revenues across companies, the market is not big enough to sustain all of them
While there is some utility value in DeFi, it basically lets users transform custodial risk into technical risk (e.g. bridge protocol hacks), which is not a free lunch.
I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.
So many of us in the education world have seen this precise change in our students over the past decade: They have more difficulty reading books, sitting through a 75-minute class, or doing their homework.
After many years, Sublime Text remains one of my favourite code editors. I still often use it to edit huge files or to make heavy edits through its powerful find and replace feature.
I switched to Firefox when Safari 15 was released. John Gruber summarized the issues I had with it perfectly. Since Apple reverted their design changes in recent releases, I'm back at using Safari as my primary
I switched to Firefox when Safari 15 was released. John Gruber summarized the issues I had with it perfectly. Since Apple reverted their design changes in recent releases, I'm back at using Safari as my primary
Lovevery Kits are just the ultimate. We have this play gym (as does everybody?!) which works with the Montessori toys they make. They have kits for different age groups from newborn through 51 months (I cannot even begin to calculate how old that is) and they have taught me so much about baby development!
Not a podcast, but Radiooooo is a world map where you can click on countries and pick a decade to listen to popular music from that place and time. What will they think of next!
the coffee bed would act on these molecules by filtering them out a bit like oxygen adsorbers keep oxygen in; it just provides a gigantic maze of free surface area for them to stick on, and hopefully the microscopic fluid velocity is gentle enough to not drag them along.
the depth of a coffee bed, contrary to the width of the coffee bed, is a variable that impacts the flavor of the coffee being brewed significantly, and in a way that you cannot easily compensate for by changing other brew variables.
changing the dripper diameter, keeping all other important variables fixed, has no impact on the brew mechanics and the resulting cup, in an "idealized" scenario
In other words, I still use exactly the same recipe that I developed for the Pulsar when I brew with the mini, I just brew with a dose smaller by a factor 0.6 (e.g., 15 grams instead of 25).
Every episode he goes to a small town in England and he does a comedy set in a local venue about the history of the town. And so he does very deep research... I love that sort of like hyperlocal, like comedy, that sort of British culture thing.
I’ve got a GitHub actions thing that runs a piece of software I wrote called shot-scraper that runs Playwright, that loads up a browser in GitHub actions to scrape that webpage and turn the results into JSON, which then get turned into an atom feed, which I subscribe to in NetNewsWire.
I’ve got a GitHub actions thing that runs a piece of software I wrote called shot-scraper that runs Playwright, that loads up a browser in GitHub actions to scrape that webpage and turn the results into JSON, which then get turned into an atom feed, which I subscribe to in NetNewsWire.
Iyoshi Cola. Craft colas are often disappointing, but this one was absolutely delicious. Wish I could get it in the States for less than $14 a can. (A)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season three). Maybe didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the previous two season, but I love spending time with these people and look forward to doing more of that when season four drops. (B+)
Fantastic Four. It was ok? Aside from a few things, I’m having trouble getting excited about post-Infinity Saga Marvel. There was just a special alchemy about that whole arc that is proving impossible to reproduce. (B)
I want to like emphasize that I think the value function is something like it's going to make RL more efficient and I think that makes a difference but I think that anything you can do with a value function you can do without just more slowly.
The models are much more like the first student but even more because then we say okay so the model should be good at competitive programming so let's get every single competitive programming problem ever and then let's do some data augmentation so we have even more competitive programming problems
Further, the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘Dark Ages’ and that a term we used for source survival has escaped containment and been rendered meaningless by a bunch of poorly read self-congratulatory dolts is, in fact, what we call ‘settled academic fact’.
Because of how source survival works, or indeed, how architectural survival works, we are often encouraged to think of the past as a place populated entirely by the wealthy elite.
There is no such thing as revisionist history. Writing history is a constant process of re-evaluation of sources and attempts to control for the biases of the past as well as our own.
If you are interested in learning more about how humans communicate and work together, I highly recommend reading When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.
If you're stuck on a rock in the middle of nowhere, and you somehow haven't discovered the glory of Starlink, maybe just stick to your old full-disk backup ways.
There's even a case to be made that those policies actually depressed the manufacturing share of GDP: by boosting output and capacity above where they would have been otherwise, subsidies probably contributed to the sustained decline in prices for China's manufactured goods over the past few years, weighing on their share of nominal output.
Both of these trends are a consequence of economic success, in terms of higher output and productivity: at least some of what is decried as "de-industrialization" is good actually. It is also good for China's planners to recognize that reality and not distort the economy in pursuit of an impossible outcome.
It isn't easy dealing with peer pressure and a room of warm and friendly staff begging you say something, anything nice about their terrible product for fear of losing their jobs -- and realizing you must be brutal to their faces otherwise you're not helping the vendor or your own company.
If you are in regular meetings with a hardware vendor as a customer (or potential customer) you can accomplish a lot by providing firm and tough feedback, particularly with Intel today.
This is, bar none, the best sled I have ever used for pushing or pulling. It isn't cheap, but I use it infinitely more than the cheaper sleds I've bought in the past.
Similarly, AI translation will prevent you from learning to speak another language, AI summaries will block you from really understanding the arguments laid out in a book, and AI analyses of your personal problems will make it harder for you to think through solutions to your own problems.
Point of view is essential for effective twists. Contrast Frozen with Fight Club, where the narrator's unreliability works because the entire story flows through his perspective and he maintains a direct relationship with the audience through fourth-wall breaks.
Cormac McCarthy's Child of God is the perfect starter book to see if you enjoy McCarthy's maximalist prose and macabre images before tackling the longer Blood Meridian.
A reminder that my novel Metallic Realms is available at a bookstore near you. Reviews call it "brilliant" (Esquire), "a total blast" (Chicago Tribune), "unrelentingly smart and inventive" (Locus), and "just plain wonderful" (Booklist). Maybe the perfect holiday gift for the booklover in your life?
I just realized the only 2 countries left with actual substantial startup activity now are literally only the US and China The rest of the world can't really do startups, doesn't have the funding, can't grow them and it's more like performative hobby projects for their governments Which might tell us where the future wealth will be concentrated in the world
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing.
It significantly lowered the bar to production. It is how we got the whole
society to run on software. If you make it harder for hobbyists maintainers, you
are going to crash society.
Making licenses suddenly commercial for big entities? You are forcing people to
go back through the Procurement process. They will shift over time back
to a FOSS solution, even if it is less good.
FOSS solve that problem far more than it solves “we don’t want to pay”. Most
corporations would be surprised by how cheap it would cost them to pay
for the FOSS software they use.
But even more important than efficiency, designed experiments can inform about causality, which is very difficult to determine from collected observed data.
this fundamentally this category of coding and AI is probably going to be one of the biggest categories right it is a software factory category in fact it may be bigger than knowledge work
So this AI thing will be that right. So if you take coding um what we built with GitHub and VS code in over whatever decades uh suddenly the coding assistant is that big in one year and so that I think is what's going to happen as well which is the market expands massively.
even if the tech is diffusing fast uh this time around for true economic growth to appear it has to sort of diffuse to a point where the work the work artifact and the workflow has to change and so that's kind of one place where I think uh the change management required for a corporation to truly change I think is something we shouldn't discount
Theodora Goss's latest book of short stories is 'Letters From an Imaginary Country,' and it manages to be one of the most voraciously, delightfully readable books I've ever read and it's one of the most writerly books, too. What a treat!
If a bed is too deep, one has to use a very coarse grind. The result in the cup may or may not be good enough, but the extraction level will be low, which is inefficient, in the sense of wasting coffee material.
That's great, but I don't think it can replace a human poking at virtual machines; my experience with EC2 is that images break in all sorts of wild ways, and nothing beats a human for saying "huh, I have no idea what's going on here but something seems weird".
In Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works, legendary cypherpunk Perry Metzger teams up with Penelope Spector and illustrator Jerel Dye for a tour-de-force young adult comic book that uses hilarious steampunk dinosaurs to demystify the most foundational building-blocks of computers. It's astounding
I think the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there’s something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens, because what they’re saying is, “I like humans apart from the bad bits.”
And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally, it doesn’t really matter what’s going on in their head; they haven’t actually got one, but what they say is what’s going to make you realize who they are.
Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist.
You know, you were in, you were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor, and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn’t feel like you’d started it.
I do not think this book could really be enjoyed without the previous book, but with it, it's lots of skillfully-written fun, and leaves me eager for more.
I think a great book could be written on all this. (Among other things, it should be catnip to anyone who wants to call themselves a historical materialist.) This book, however, is merely OK.
Raymond Biesinger's new book 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off is a masterclass in how creative workers can transform the endless, low-grade seething about the endless ripoffs of the industry into something productive and even profound
But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.
there are many people who still refuse to believe that renewables can be practical even as renewables keep growing around the world, in fact accounting for the bulk of growth in electricity generation
If I took my daughter to China for a year, and we just lived there with no language instruction, I'd come back knowing approximately six Mandarin words and she'd be fluent.
An idea I'm trying to hold tighter is that the only way to be useful here is to risk offending people. And perhaps if you're not taking any risk offending people then it's unlikely you're saying something useful.
I had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all.
Read this in the context of Christopher et al., and the reasonable conclusion is that many of the problems associated with homelessness are the result of unsheltered homelessness.
It turns out that simply getting people into temporary shelter—often derided by the homelessness-industrial complex as a band-aid—significantly reduces both social and individual harms of unsheltered homelessness.
My sense is that this hybrid is fairly common in practice; solvers aren't magical and if you can deduce additional structure using domain-specific analysis, it will often give the solver an important boost.
If human beings can dismiss academic arguments merely because they lead to politically unwelcome conclusions, what’s the point of having academic arguments about politically-charged subjects?
It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.
An average email or line of code is fine. Average art isn’t. To make something alive with AI, we have to resist its pull towards average by working beside it, shaping what it gives, and listening for what’s missing.
So while vibe coding may be useful for short-term work, it’s not a suitable approach for anything intended to last longer than a tub of yogurt. Time saved is not strength gained, so I went looking for other examples about how to work with the machine.
The fractures fell neatly along disciplines: engineers using AI to wish away designers, designers wishing away engineers, product managers wishing away both. In this climate, AI becomes frenemy identification technology, another way to avoid working together.
You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.
With great freedom comes great responsibility. You have the autonomy to choose what to work on, but there's the expectation of accountability and impact.
Being right is less than half the battle. You also have to convince others that you're right, and more importantly, convince them to care enough to act on it.
One possible reading of the last century or so of political history in China, therefore, is that governments who provide a meritocratic channel for social advancement have legitimacy and popular support, and governments who do not provide one, do not.
So like they don't have enough intelligence. They're not multimodal enough. They can't do computer use and all this kind of stuff. And they don't do a lot of things. You know, they don't have continual learning. You can't just tell them something and they'll remember it. And they're just cognitively lacking. And it's just not working. And I just think that it will take about a decade to work through all of those issues.
I think that for those who can create and then articulate a framework around what is taste for us that is really a important skill and uh then I think people can a lot of people can basically match a framework not many people can create the framework.
It's just this loop of okay, I'm having an experience of any sense. Maybe I'm looking at art, maybe I'm hearing music, maybe I'm literally eating food and tasting something, you know, but like do I like it? Do I not like it? Why?
we're looking for high judgment individuals, people that are going to roll up their sleeves and do a lot, whether they're IC's or managers, and people that are going to get the details and perfect their craft, because we know that's how we're going to win is by having the best craft, the best design.
I think in this world where software can be created more easily, design matters so much and designers matter so much. I think designers are going to be the leaders of the future and I think that more designers need to speak step into that leadership role
if you want to win in the game of software, you need to differentiate through design. Like that's again how you win or lose. Craft matters. And so we're no longer in this era of good enough is fine. It's like good enough is not enough.
The empirical evidence strongly refutes the idea that rising opportunity costs of childbearing are driving low fertility. Declining marriage due to exogenous technology and economics shocks is tanking fertility irrespective of child direct or opportunity costs.
the shift from 50th to 99th percentile earnings has no negative effect on women’s fertility, and unearned income for women has a neutral-to-positive effect
Although the cross-sectional relationship between national income and fertility is negative, the longitudinal relationship between national income and fertility is positive: economic booms create baby booms, economic busts create baby busts.
I don’t see population collapse or lack of workers as the central policy problem: the central policy problem is human happiness, human flourishing, and the freedom to live life well.
In general your body would rather use glycogen than fat, because glycogen loses almost no energy in the conversion from and to sugar and fat loses a lot.
Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.
This is the best screenshot utility for Macs. You’d think how much can there be in a screenshot utility, and CleanShot X will still color you surprised.
I approached Echoes of October with trepidation. A graphic novel about violence and grief isn’t easy terrain. But it succeeds in a haunting, urgent way.
Data centers are so much more efficient with their water that they generate 50x as much tax revenue per unit of water used than golf courses in the county:
So AI consumes approximately 0.04% of America’s freshwater if you include onsite and offsite use, and only 0.008% if you include just the water in data centers.
For much more on that side of things, you should read Money Stuff or listen to Odd Lots, which cover “private credit is the new bank lending” all the time.
For much more on that side of things, you should read Money Stuff or listen to Odd Lots, which cover “private credit is the new bank lending” all the time.
A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that state-level load growth from 2019 to 2024 — including growth driven by data centers, manufacturing, and electrification — was associated with lower average retail electricity prices, not higher ones.
In some cases, design is what something looks like. In other cases, design is how something works. But the most interesting designs to me are when design changes your behavior. Even the smallest details can change how someone interacts with something.
And I think what's also kind of interesting is that just human nature is that if you have a question that you feel like, you know, you might be a bit embarrassed to ask or you don't want to bother someone, you just don't ask the question, right? And so by the nature of having these tools, you get actually a pretty large explosion of questions being asked.
And if I'm starting to see like more and more experiments that are not statistically significant, that may be a signal to me to say, okay, we might have kind of tried to exploit a little bit too far. Like there might not be as much juice to squeeze.
I mean in my experience the typical win rate and I hate to use that term for experiments is is often something like 30 to 50%. Like usually you're not actually get like you're trying a bunch of things a lot of hypotheses turn out not to be true. you know, consumer products are very unpredictable like that.
When you lose a game now as opposed to surfacing your blunders and your like horrible stuff that you did, we flip it on its head. And so we show you your brilliant moves, your best moves. And we have coach say something encouraging. You know, losing just part of learning like keep it up, that type of thing. That change alone was pretty dramatic for us. It grew game reviews by 25%, subscriptions by 20%
If you do too much exploration, you can have your team feel a little bit too scattershot, just trying a 100 different random ideas. What's the through line? What's the strategy? How do you pattern match, you know, successes across them? And if you do too much in exploitation, which is often the MMO of growth teams, it can lead to this like saturation and stagnation where you're just locally maximizing a thing.
The overall workflow is intuitive, especially for those new to formal evaluation processes. The UI guides you through creating datasets, running experiments, and annotating results.
The panel had a generally positive view of Braintrust, highlighting its clean UI and structured approach to evaluations. The tool’s emphasis on human-in-the-loop workflows was a significant strength.
The panel had a generally positive view of Phoenix, with one panelist calling it one of his “favorite open source eval tools.” The tool is positioned as a developer-first, notebook-centric platform.
As for me personally, I tend to use these tools as a backend data store and use Jupyter notebooks as well as my own custom built annotation interfaces for most of my needs.
And you're supposed to be really connected, but the conclusion you reach very early is that the more connected and accessible you are, the less productive you are.
I don't think a phone is a necessary device. I remember growing up, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I was a student at the university, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I finally got to use a mobile phone, I never used phone calls.
So it's extremely important to curate the information sources that you have, so that you wouldn't be somebody who is left to the will of AI-based algorithmic feed telling you what's important so that you end up consuming the same information, the same stuff, the same memes, the same news as everybody else.
So think about this. If your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure? This sounds ridiculous.
Well, the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed, so you make sure that they don't stand in your way. If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you and then make yourself be comfortable with it, there is nothing more left to be afraid of.
it seems like struggle is a part of life, either you do it earlier or you do it later. And it’s true, that’s such a good point that competition does seem to be a really powerful driver of skill development
I think this situation, this historic wrong that’s been done is, put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There’s no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this.
One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That’s really important to realize the content you consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind. You have to disconnect yourself.
If you’re stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don’t want to do anything, to do something. Try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.
This is a short (~150 pp), brisk first book on the topic for physicists. Most of the book --- the first ten chapters --- are good introduction to common models of spin glasses.
The scalable method is you learn from experience. Um you uh you you try things, you see what you see what works. No one no one has to tell you. First of all, you have a goal. So without a goal, uh there's no sense of right or wrong or better or worse. So large language models are trying to get by without having a goal or a sense of better or worse. That's just, you know, it's exactly starting in the wrong place.
So there's no ground truth. You can't have prior knowledge if you don't have ground truth because the prior knowledge is supposed to be a hint or an initial belief about what the truth is.
reinforcement learning is about understanding your world whereas large language models are about mimicking people doing what people say you should do. They're not about figuring out what to do.
the perspective I outline is very bullish on AI capabilities and very concerned about the risks which may arise by default, but also hopeful that, through foresight and vigorous action, we can mitigate the worst of these risks.
Companies and countries are tempted to cut corners by default and would benefit from some rules of the road, at least if they're sure others will follow those rules.
Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman
Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman
Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman
Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman
Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman
but if I was, you know, at the zero or 10th percentile, it can certainly get me even today very quickly up to like the 60th 70th in terms of um what the state of the art is.
And so the main thing that I felt so excited about and this is something I tell my team all the time is we need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles.
if you're really unclear about what success looks like the prompt, you're probably not going to get the most amazing work. Um I think that's true for managing teams and it's very much true for managing AIs.
And you have to understand the strengths of of you know used to be people but now it's basically models and different models have different strengths. So it's like they have different personalities
management is just about in my mind having an outcome. So you want to get something done. That's the thing. You have a northstar. You have a vision and you're just trying to figure out how to use the resources that you have to get that thing done.
His officers didn't think so. High command said, “No, we're not going to attack the West; we're going to lose.” And Hitler was fanatic about it, he really wanted to attack it. They were planning a coup against him in November 1939 just to prevent him ordering the attack on the West, because it would have been a catastrophe for Germany.
That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs. Actually, that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountains, if you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I.
And he said this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler's degeneration as a leader. He made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war, and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you can link that to drugs.
So the Navy hired the shoe runners unit from the SS, paid them money, and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and chewing gum and all kinds of things. So this is a big thing, you know. And there are documents to it.
But it was used by right-wingers, and Hitler didn't mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right-wing populism, I would claim now here, and Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk, or maybe even very drunk, because if you're drunk you also get aggressive against others.
I I think this is golden age of humanity right now. It's the I think it's the end of the beginning. And and so I think we will um I think people in 1,000 years will um study these times uh the way we are studying um Cicero's times of the end of the Roman Republic
Just imagine you use very bad software and um the team that started the project decided early to use Xamarin and then they never had a chance of making this as good as all the other things you really appreciate on your phone due to this decision no matter how good they are.
what you are try like trying to do as a tool maker, as an infrastructure builder, um as a product maker is you want to make a uh tool that brings the floor up significantly, but doesn't constrain the ceiling. And that is extremely hard.
You don't even need to predict the future that well. If you just live in everyone else's relative future, which really is just a couple of um high conviction high courage uh update to beta clicks. It's not that hard to live in the future.
Well, when the institutions are over and over spectacularly wrong, whether just incompetent, politicized, or mendacious, there is a reason for loss of trust.
The “climate crisis” has been taught as gospel for 20 years. Now the average person can see their teachers have been preaching politics in the name of science.
climate change though real is not the civilization-threatening disaster pitched at Davos, Paris, and the media, that hugely expensive climate policies do no good
And I think we'll see the same thing with automation where uh basically robot plus human is much better than just human or just robot. Uh and and that just like makes total sense. It also makes it much easier to get all the technology bootstrapped because when it's robot plus human, now there's a lot more potential for the robot to like actually learn on the job, acquire new skills.
So, I think it'll be the same thing that that we'll see an increase in the scope that we're giving that we're willing to give to the robots as they get better and better where initially the scope might be like there is a particular thing you do like you're making the coffee or something. Uh whereas as they get more capable, as their ability to have common sense and a broader repertoire of tasks increases, then we'll give them greater scope. Now you're running the whole coffee shop.
Like if you answer a question, you just like answered it wrong. It's like well it's not like you can just like go back and like tweak a few things like the person you told the answer to might not even know that it's wrong. Whereas if you're like folding the t-shirt and you messed up a little bit like it's pretty obvious like you can reflect on that, figure out what happened and do it better next time.
Uh but it uh I think we kind of like know like roughly the puzzle pieces and it's something that we need to work on and I think if we work on it and we're a bit lucky and everything kind of goes as planned I think single digit is reasonable.
So to me like what what I tend to think about a lot in terms of timelines is not the date when it will be done but the date when it will when like the flywheel starts basically.
I don't say this lightly, but I feel like indie games right now are the best they've ever been, and I want to live up to that new standard with my own work.
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