Related posts
Andrew Kelley Site
The the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
Top people
Showing Profile →
Hiding
Hiding
18 September
17 September
-
Their words
Historically, whenever companies get power over what people's computing facilities can do, they use it against us, building malicious functionalities, designed to benefit them, into the software they invite us to use.
15 September
14 September
13 September
-
Their words
It's hard to escape that economic engine, and easy to mistake its machinations for reality-a supply rising to meet demand, say, rather than a warped supply that whips up demand.
12 September
11 September
10 September
9 September
8 September
-
korrents.com
Large language models are grown rather than built, and nobody really knows how the resulting working AI functions.Their words
Large language models are “grown, not built”. Researchers run training data through a neural network. Eventually this creates a working AI; nobody really knows how.
7 September
-
Their words
I agree with Jakub that alignment is not a side problem, it is the central problem, if you ‘solved alignment’ in the relevant senses the rest becomes easy and if you don’t the rest is impossible or worse
6 September
-
korrents.com
Any task can be made arbitrarily difficult or effectively impossible depending on how its context is framed.Their words
You can create an in-context impossible or very difficult task out of anything.
3 September
-
korrents.com
Rising AI capability is undermining the assumptions that justify slow, manual government processes.Their words
AI creates a crisis by making the assumptions on which government operates untenable.
2 September
1 September
-
Their words
We’re positively reinforcing AI for success on benchmarks, including impossible benchmarks , then negatively reinforcing it for getting caught cheating.
-
korrents.com
True AI alignment is impossible because obedience and benevolence are fundamentally incompatible goals.Their words
AI alignment will forever be balancing the tradeoff between paperclip-maximizing and disempowerment, because these two rival concepts of alignment are fundamentally incompatible.
-
Their words
The reason for this hardline stance is that we believe in the value of human thought and experience, as told by people with first-hand knowledge. It’s also about the audience: The “audience” for AI-written code is usually a machine, whereas the writing in Pragmatic Engineer is for humans, by humans. AI produces a statistical average in its output which creates uniform, dull text that’s an inferior reading experience to human writing – at least today it is.
From one piece Ajeya Cotra – "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get" 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
sometimes I talk to people in DC and their their natural inclination is to say why don't you punish the model for doing these bad things like why don't you like bring it under heel and like uh like you know show it who's boss and that is a very dangerous way to address these issues right
-
Their words
I do think I want to push back on the cyber on the brain hypothesis that you raised a couple of times. We didn't find like particular evidence for the cyber nature of the task making all the hacking and crimes that they did more likely versus the impossible nature of the task.
-
Their words
But in many of these cases, this vulnerability is just not broad or deep enough to ever actually be exploitable to get the flag. So a bunch of exploit gym problems are just unintentionally impossible. The authors estimate roughly 30 to 40% of these problems are impossible in this way.
31 August
-
Their words
these kids have a block that they can't do it. You do whatever you can including paying them to break through the block. they then see themselves as a different person
25 August
-
Their words
I’m thinking about banning Claude code at Shopify until they change their mind and read AGENTS.md and .agents/skills etc. Insisting on only reading CLAUDE.md sometimes leads to split brain problems when different team members use different tools. Just unnecessary.
20 August
16 August
-
Readrcmnd.app
Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time TravelTheir words
It’s a very interesting book, but for some reason Michio Kaku’s style doesn’t spark me as much as Briane Greene’s or Stephen Hawking’s or Neil deGrasse Tyson’s.
12 August
-
Their words
they found that Big Oil's use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI's data centers.
10 August
-
Their words
If you count all the permutations, you can write all the tests you want. It is impossible to cover all of these and not break things from time to time. It is infinitely harder to evolve software that has users.
8 August
-
korrents.com
If nobody creates content any more because everyone just asks an AI, there is nothing left for AI to train on.Their words
The problem is if nobody creates new content anymore and just asks their AI every question, the AI has nothing to train on anymore
7 August
From one piece Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
I think the best companies in my experience come from what might be characterized as scenes. There's like a moment that enables a new company to be born and there's a bunch that comes together that really creates this like unique nucleation for the new company.
-
Their words
And so we can distribute the voting across a lot of the company for this initial review, which is essential because if you're doing anything cool, by the time you get a couple years into it, that top of funnel is overwhelming. And if you place any in any small group of employees or any one person in the way as a bottle bottleneck on this, they will absolutely bottleneck the whole rest of the organization.
5 August
3 August
30 July
-
Their words
To be clear, this doesn't mean there will never be bubbles or crashes. There definitely will be. It is just that nobody can predict them.
28 July
-
Their words
one of the most important things we discovered along the way is it's extremely difficult to iterate with outside suppliers, particularly outside suppliers in aerospace, which are let's just say I have no kind words for them. So we chose to build our own machine shop. And now we can go from a digitally designed engine part to a prototype part in about 24 hours.
20 July
13 July
-
Their words
What’s fallacious is to argue that this fact necessarily means the prohibition does not “work,” or is not better than legalization.
12 July
-
Their words
Another example is Bitcoin. It’s the Unix of money. You can send millions with a keystroke or rm your entire fortune. That’s more upside and more downside, by making people power users, and taking away the system administrator.
7 July
22 June
-
Their words
although students' personal statements seem more creative because they use more varied words, they actually feature less original ideas. AI writing produces an illusion of creativity.
18 June
-
korrents.com
Active investing collectively drags down portfolio returns, and the evidence leaves almost no counter-argument.Their words
there is almost no counter to the argument that active investing collectively creates a drag on portfolio performance
16 June
-
Their words
And soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to
9 June
-
Their words
the competitive dynamic in China is more intense because it's more intense. Everyone's chosen to go open source and that creates a system that in my mind is capable of innovating far faster than the competitive system we have here. All the models learn from one another.
3 June
-
Their words
There have been countries that have gone through currency resets. This is not a nice experience because if you had a little bit of money, a currency reset can mean you have now no money. If you had no money, it may feel like it's impossible to ever get any more money. If you're retired, what do you do during a currency reset?
20 May
From one piece Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
Memory safety is this idea that no matter how stupid the code you write is, it's not going to have a certain class of bugs. And this is the, you know, the kind of bug that usually leads into security vulnerabilities.
-
Their words
I think the same kind of principle applies with agents in that they can talk to the compiler. It will tell them what to fix. So I guess this could be a case. We we'll see. But Rust could be a pretty promising candidate for to use for agents because they can get more feedback and it's just hard it's harder to to ship certain type of bugs or maybe impossible to have certain type of bugs.
16 May
7 May
-
Their words
there is no principal-agent problem, because the human driving the machine takes on the responsibility for its actions by owning the deployment.
4 May
1 May
-
korrents.com
AI data centres cannot be meaningfully reformed without a fundamental change of course and ideology in the industry.Their words
Reformation is impossible for AI data centres, at least, not without a massive change of course and an ideological reckoning.
7 April
-
Their words
Um and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.
1 April
-
Their words
every feature that we want to put out has to be queued up on mobile development bandwidth dispatch bandwidth and it become impossible to navigate tradeoff because every feature you want to do you have to go negotiate with so many team
22 March
-
Their words
For that to be true, agents need to be able to see and understand the system. And agents need to be able to improve the things that need fixed. For that to be true, humans need to be able to see and understand the system and then take action to fix it. Uh and for that to be true, we got to see the system.
20 March
-
Their words
So, I think AI has basically driven the cost of idea generation down to almost zero in a very similar way to how the internet drove the cost of communication down to almost zero, which is an amazing thing, but it you know, it it it doesn't make it doesn't create abundance by itself.
10 March
-
Their words
This, in turn, creates serious estimation problems for the diversion rate, which is why environmental benefit-cost analyses underrate the effect of urban rail construction.
3 March
-
korrents.com
Long stretches of being disconnected -- no internet, no phone, no people -- are what make creative work possible.Their words, before
All the best, happiest, and most creatively productive times in my life have something in common: being disconnected.
Their words now
Media silence creates a vacuum, which your own thoughts expand to fill.
-
korrents.com
Long stretches of being disconnected -- no internet, no phone, no people -- are what make creative work possible.Their words
Media silence creates a vacuum, which your own thoughts expand to fill.
7 January
-
Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World's Greatest TeamsTheir words
sports section looks at the leadership qualities of the most successful sports leaders in history. And they’re not what you think.
1 January
-
Their words
the cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future. And so what you find is that a lot of things that typically get categorized as a bad habit, eating too many donuts or smoking a cigarette or something like that feels good in the moment, but it creates some kind of cost or consequence in the future.
-
Lovedrcmnd.app
Iris Kelly Doesn't DateTheir words
My favorite books I read this year were Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls sapphic romance trilogy: Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, and Iris Kelly Doesn't Date. These are not perfect books, but they made me laugh, made me cry, and were impossible to put down.
-
Lovedrcmnd.app
Delilah Green Doesn't CareTheir words
My favorite books I read this year were Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls sapphic romance trilogy: Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, and Iris Kelly Doesn't Date. These are not perfect books, but they made me laugh, made me cry, and were impossible to put down.
-
Lovedrcmnd.app
Astrid Parker Doesn't FailTheir words
My favorite books I read this year were Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls sapphic romance trilogy: Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, and Iris Kelly Doesn't Date. These are not perfect books, but they made me laugh, made me cry, and were impossible to put down.
21 December 2025
5 December 2025
26 November 2025
-
Mixed onrcmnd.app
Fantastic FourTheir words
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)
23 November 2025
-
korrents.com
A declining manufacturing share of GDP as an economy matures reflects economic success rather than decline.Their words
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.
6 November 2025
14 October 2025
-
Their words
immigration is mathematically irrelevant to the central policy problem of low fertility
Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com
5 October 2025
-
Their words
And the third one is like we did a lot of actually PR uh prior to the service going out just to get the word out. Um and you know PR has has its time and place. Uh but I think doing it before you have validation that customers definitely want the thing is quite risky. It can lead to a lot of sunk cost uh once you get it out because you're you're just you know you need to see it through.
30 September 2025
-
Their words
No. We designed a system in a way that's impossible. It'll require us to change the system and we won't do that because we made a promise to our users. We would rather shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that.
18 August 2025
23 July 2025
-
Their words
Including things like universal basic provision or something like that where a lot of the increased productivity gets shared out and distributed to society and maybe in the form of services and other things where if you want more than that, you still go and get some incredibly rare skills and things like that and make yourself unique. But there's a basic provision that is provided.
1 July 2025
-
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.
10 June 2025
-
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.
5 May 2025
From one piece Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
I would find it impossible to not pursue a discovery that I could imagine my way through, if I can really see how to get there. I cannot imagine abandoning it for some other reason, fear that it would be misused, which is a real fear.
-
Their words
It becomes impossible to imagine that life was not sparked somewhere else, in our Milky Way galaxy, and maybe even in our local neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy, maybe within a few hundred light years of our solar system.
14 April 2025
-
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.
23 March 2025
-
Their words
what is it that creates true virality? It's not viral mechanics. It's word of mouth. It is brand that this is how you can kickstart a brand.
3 February 2025
-
Their words
I almost think it's practically impossible because you effectively have to remove them from the internet.
19 January 2025
From one piece Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #457 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
And Friedman advanced a policy that was really abstract and really it was devoid of judgment. It was pure and beautiful in that way but utterly impractical.
-
Their words
So I do think it's really hard to have an original thought. We are social creatures. We encounter the same situations again and again. And so it's really hard. You're born into these traditions of thinking and being and knowing. And most people are never going to question them, and most people are never going to become aware of them.
30 November 2024
26 August 2024
-
Their words
The list of “complicity” in various bad things worries me because every platform has some element of that kind of content going on, in part because it’s impossible to stop entirely.
21 May 2024
-
korrents.com
Per-engineer productivity inevitably declines somewhat as an organization and its codebase growTheir words
It is almost inevitable that per-engineer productivity drops to some extent as an organization and codebase grows, even though it's also nearly-impossible to quantify that effect.
19 May 2024
-
Their words
It is impossible to add new members forever without decreasing quality.
2 April 2024
-
Their words
What is different about construction is the level of coordination that takes place: whereas in a car everything is carefully designed to tightly integrate together, in housing construction the work can be done (and often is) with surprisingly little coordination between the various trades.
26 March 2024
-
Their words
The internet is a micro medium. It is the best medium ever developed to reach specific people, but it is terrible at reaching everyone. There is no homepage. It is impossible to reach a hundred million people in one day on the internet, which is something TV used to do every night.
22 March 2024
-
Their words
So, in addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there’s this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that’s impossible, right? You can’t just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you’re the only one who can do that.
18 February 2024
-
Their words
The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure.
31 December 2023
-
korrents.com
Metaprogramming in a language creates fundamental obstacles to static analysis of its code.Their words
Languages with metaprogramming tend to put up fundamental hurdles to static analysis
19 December 2023
-
korrents.com
Whatever safety gain a driver-assistance system delivers is cancelled out by the driver complacency it creates.Their words
suggests that any steering automation safety gains (e.g., Level 2 autopilot) are approximately negated by driver complacency, with autopilot on being slightly worse than autopilot off
14 December 2023
-
Their words
Long-term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long-term, that are impossible to solve if you think short-term. And we aren't really good at thinking long-term. Five years is a tough timeframe for most institutions to think past.
17 November 2023
From one piece John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 | Lex Fridman Podcast #401 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
korrents.com
There is no evidence Putin intended to conquer Ukraine, and the army he sent could not have done it.Their words
There's no evidence he was interested in conquering all of Ukraine. There was no evidence beforehand that he was interested in conquering any of Ukraine. And there's no way that an army that had 190,000 troops, at the most, could have conquered all of Ukraine, it's just impossible.
-
korrents.com
The war in Ukraine will not end in a peace agreement but in an unstable frozen conflict.Their words
I don't think there's any real prospect of a meaningful peace agreement. I think it's almost impossible. I think the best you can hope for at this point is, at some point the shooting stops, you have a ceasefire, and then you have a frozen conflict. And that frozen conflict will not be highly stable.
28 September 2023
-
korrents.com
Open sourcing a foundation model creates significantly more value than the risk it carries.Their words
I think at this point there's the value of open sourcing, a foundation model like Llama 2. It's significantly greater than the risks in my view.
13 September 2023
-
Their words
Moreover, model exfiltration is likely impossible to reverse.
Self-exfiltration is a key dangerous capabilityaligned.substack.com
28 May 2023
-
korrents.com
Pasture-fed meat cannot be scaled up to feed the world, because there is not enough land on Earth for it.Their words
Their solutions, such as pasture-fed meat, with its massive land demand , are impossible to scale without destroying remaining wild ecosystems: there is simply not enough planet.
12 January 2023
-
Their words
Our best explanation is that the UK adopted what we call the globalized system of procurement, privatizing planning functions to consultants and privatizing risk to contractors, which creates more conflict; the UK also has an unusually high soft cost factor.
High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com
7 September 2022
From one piece Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
But the thing is, you can’t have this if you don’t have an oxygenated planet because it’s all, in the end, it’s about how much energy can you extract from the food you eat? And if you don’t have an oxygenated planet, you can get about 10% out, not much more than that. And if you’ve got an oxygenated planet, you can get about 40% out.
-
Their words
It’s possible it started multiple occasions. There’s two provisos to that. One of them is oxygen makes it impossible really for life to start. So, as soon as we’ve got oxygen in the atmosphere, then life isn’t going to keep starting over.
-
korrents.com
If we found a thousand life forms across the universe, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.Their words
I would say pretty fundamental. I wouldn’t like to say it’s impossible for life to start any other way, but water is everywhere. Water’s extremely good at what it does, and carbon works in water especially well. And carbon is everywhere. So, those things together make me think probabilistically, if we found 1,000 life forms, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.
28 August 2022
10 June 2022
-
Their words
None of this is about anything being impossible in principle.
1 June 2022
-
Their words
The proposition is that the cancellation of the bonds held by the central bank would decrease the amount of interest payments and thus the debt service of governments. And indeed, it would. But it would have another effect—namely, to decrease the revenues of the central bank and thus the profits that the central bank turns in to the government. This second effect would be exactly of the same size as the first, and the net effect on the government budget constraint would be equal to zero.
30 May 2022
-
korrents.com
Experiencing a wild animal on its own terms creates a real connection that seeing the same animal in a zoo cannot.Their words
Being on the orangutans schedule and at his convenience vs. going to the zoo is something like love vs. prostitution.
25 January 2022
-
korrents.com
Open access to information makes a closed information regime on the Soviet model fundamentally impossible to sustain.Their words
it's like could you ever have another Soviet Union like in the era of the internet? Um you know North Korea's doing their damndest to try to maintain that model you know but without going full North Korea like I'm not sure you can. I I mean, I guess I'm an optimist on this point. Like I tend to think open access information basically makes a lot of these historical things, you know, fundamentally impossible.
7 January 2022
-
Their words
People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will.
22 November 2021
-
Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Man From the FutureTheir words
Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future – A biography not only of the genius’s genius, John von Neumann, but also of von Neumann’s ideas and influence, which are nearly impossible to exaggerate. Serious and brilliantly-written.
16 August 2021
-
Their words
the perfectionist's fantasy of reaching her deathbed with a perfect record of accomplishments under her belt isn't just extremely unlikely, but doomed from the start
20 July 2021
-
Their words
The problem that companies like Apple need to solve is not preventing exploits forever, but a much simpler one: they need to screw up the economics of NSO-style mass exploitation.
A case against security nihilismblog.cryptographyengineering.com
28 October 2020
-
Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
From Impossible to InevitableTheir words
This book is a great overview of the keys to building a repeatable sales model for your SaaS business. It's a great mix of the best lessons from Jason Lemkin and his SaaStr blog and Aaron Ross's top tier consulting work. You can skip the last 50 pages which transitions to being a bad self-help book.
21 April 2020
-
Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
ValrhonaTheir words
My favorite cocoa powder (Valrhona) is one of the most expensive and I can only encourage you not to try it because I've found it impossible to use others since.
9 February 2020
-
Lovedrcmnd.app
The RoadTheir words
This is a sad, depressing love story of a father to his son. It’s pure sacrifice. The narrator’s melancholy mindset and recognition of impossible odds never derails his duty to his boy. It’s the pinnacle of grace.
18 July 2019
-
Their words
For one, if you don’t learn to hear the sounds in a new language, you’re doomed to have a hard time remembering it.
Discover the Key To Learning Pronunciationblog.fluent-forever.com
30 May 2019
-
korrents.com
Sharing credit generously benefits everyone because it encourages future collaboration.Their words
Credit isn't zero sum. It is often in everyone's benefit to be generous with credit, because it creates an incentive for others to help in the future.
3 December 2018
-
Likedrcmnd.app
21 Lessons for the 21st CenturyTheir words
In his fascinating new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the historian Yuval Noah Harari creates a useful framework for confronting these fears.
14 July 2018
-
On changing their mind
I’ve historically done this myself, but I’ve moved towards innovating within existing teams.
13 June 2018
-
Their words
Open source projects on GitHub represent billions of dollars in value creation, but none of that is captured on GitHub.
2 June 2018
-
Likedrcmnd.app
Thinking in BetsTheir words
Amazing point: Would your belief in something stand up to the question, “Wanna bet?” If you had to gamble significant money on that belief, would you still feel 100% about it? Or maybe more honestly 60%? This creates healthy skepticism encouraging you to seek the best information instead of just defending your belief. Now objective accuracy wins instead of argument. Combine with “The Biggest Bl…
6 September 2017
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.