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Chief Scientist at OpenAI. Worked on the research that turned scaled reinforcement learning into reasoning models, and writes about where he thinks that path leads.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No lab has solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling at maximum speed much longer.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.

  An Alien Mindopenai.com

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.

• Lovedtheir ownrcmnd.app

  Fable 5.1

  Their words

  This model is a pleasure to work with, and I've been using it for everything.

  x.com

Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The specific vaccine brand or formulation matters less than simply getting vaccinated at all.

  Their words

  There are nuances to consider for those seeking maximum protection, but ultimately, the best vaccine is the one you receive.

  Your guide to fall 2026 vaccinesyourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Optimization means measuring the gap between your code and what the hardware could theoretically do, not making changes and checking whether the statistics improved.

  Their words

  What is the underlying hardware capable of doing at its theoretical peak? And then you measure the delta between that theoretical maximum and what you have achieved.

  youtube.com

Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.

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  Dopamine drives wanting rather than liking: the pleasure of actually getting the thing runs on opioids instead, which is why an addict can want what they do not enjoy.

  Addiction

  Their words

  And the evidence suggests that wanting pursuit of a goal is mediated or modulated at least by dopamine whereas actually the liking the pleasure you might get from an outcome is not that seems to be related to uh opioid neurotransmitters in the brain.

  youtube.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Just So: An Odyssey Into the Cosmic Web of Connection, Play, and True Pleasure

  Their words

  One of the best things I had the pleasure to listen to.

  rakhim.org

Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A very long life would not grow boring, because pleasures spaced far enough apart do not wear out.

  Their words

  There are things that we naturally take pleasure in—such as friendship, sex, and Italian food—and while we can become sick of anything if continually exposed to it in large doses, we don’t get tired of these things if they are properly distributed in time.

  Immortality Sounds Pretty Good, Actuallysmallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

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  The word to kill in "minimum viable product" is viable, because viability is where hope comes from — aim at a maximum launchable product instead.

  Their words

  Minimum viable. that the viable is the the word we got to kill along with hope because viable is where hope comes from, right? If it's viable, it might make it, right?

  youtube.com

Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.

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  Careers no longer span fifty years; people should now plan in roughly five-year horizons.

  Their words

  There is no such thing as a fifty-year career anymore. At maximum, plan for five.

  🌻 the old world is dyingjasmi.news

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Pain and pleasure act as motivational backstops that keep reinforcement-learning agents inner-aligned.

  Their words

  valences like pain and pleasure have a natural account as motivational backstops for inner-aligning RL agents capable of mesa-optimization

  Time to take AI consciousness seriouslysecondbest.ca

Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.

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  Federal Reserve Board members have historically often resigned before completing their full terms.

  interest ratesgovernment

  Their words

  Federal Reserve Board members have often resigned their positions well before their 14-year terms expired, since that's quite a long time to spend in one position in government.

  Fed Board Members: Stay In Your Seatsjoshbarro.com

Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.

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  A person at maximum vibe-coding speed has about three productive hours a day, and a company that will not let them stop there is going to break.

  Their words

  You might only get three productive hours out of a person at max vibe coding speed. And yet they're still 100 times as productive as they would have been without AI. So, do you let them work for 3 hours a day? And the answer is yeah, you better.

  From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

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  Social media is built so that maximum hyperbole wins, and the negative direction pays better than the positive.

  Their words

  And unfortunately, social media in general is designed in such a way where the maximum hyperbole works, and that’s how you get the most points is by being max hyperbolic.

  youtube.com

American writer and long-term traveller. Blogs at tynan.com about travel, owning few possessions, habits and the gear he carries; author of Superhuman by Habit and Make It Big.

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  Being one short of a round-number milestone makes people fixate on completing it rather than on the milestone's actual value.

  Their words

  It's such a pointless achievement and yet when you're at 99, all you think of is going to one more country so you can never think about the number of countries you've been to again.

  Cześć 2025tynan.com

Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.

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  The Thursday Murder Club

  Their words

  The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman is a delightful whodunnit set at a retirement home in the English countryside. Great characters. Fun twists. An endearing sense of humor. Nothing fancy or experimental, just a pleasure to read (and what more can you ask from a book, really?). If, like me, you enjoy mysteries, you'll be in good hands with Osman.

  eliotpeper.substack.com

American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.

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  Having an external accountability partner makes people follow through on writing they would otherwise skip.

  Their words

  Accountability threads work! It brings me no pleasure to say this.

  why i played tennis on book tourblgtylr.substack.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  He does not drink, because alcohol damages the one tool you most need for success and happiness, and trading that for short-term pleasure is ridiculous.

  Their words

  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.

  youtube.com

Professor at Berkeley working on robot learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence, and argues that robots will learn from data rather than be programmed.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Robots will be given more scope as they get more capable, exactly the way coding assistants went from completing a function to writing a pull request.

  Their words

  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.

  youtube.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

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  The published estimates of data-centre water consumption rest on accounting choices that push the number as high as it will go.

  data centers

  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

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

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  Claude Code

  Their words

  TL;DR: Ghostty + Claude Code + minimal tooling = maximum productivity.

  steipete.me

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for the protein-structure work behind AlphaFold.

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  AI will not replace the best programmers; it will make them ten times more productive than they are today.

  Their words

  So the great programmers will be even better, but there'll be even 10X even what they are today. And because there, you'll be able to use their skills to utilize the tools to the maximum, exploit them to the maximum.

  youtube.com

Chief executive of Alphabet and Google; joined Google in 2004 and led Chrome and Android before taking over in 2015.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Scaling laws are still working, but the models people actually use run a few months behind the maximum capability Google can deliver, because the biggest model is too slow and expensive to serve.

  Google

  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.

  youtube.com

Game designer and director of the NYU Game Center; made Universal Paperclips and writes Donkeyspace.

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  Games should not be measured against any outside yardstick — not purpose, not pleasure, not politics.

  Their words

  In my approach, I resist using any external value framework as an ultimate set of criteria against which to measure games’ worth - not purpose, not pleasure, not politics.

  Are Games Good?franklantz.substack.com

Music critic and historian; author of The History of Jazz and Music: A Subversive History. Writes the newsletter The Honest Broker on music and culture.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Compulsive stimulation ends in anhedonia: the more a person leans on it the less pleasure it returns, until they use it only to avoid the pain of going without.

  Addiction

  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.

  The State of the Culture, 2024honest-broker.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  About six weeks of supply is the most a pre-railway army could buy itself by adding carrying capacity, however many wagons it brought.

  Their words

  So there are sharp limits to how much extra range an army can get by adding carrying capacity; in practice about a month and a half’s logistics buffer is the maximum that’s possible and even doing that is expensive.

  acoup.blog

Economist and journalist; Financial Times columnist as The Undercover Economist, author of How to Make the World Add Up, and presenter of the Cautionary Tales podcast.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Extra Life

  Their words

  Steven Johnson, Extra Life – Johnson explores the astonishing expansion in life expectancy over the last two hundred years, and asks how we measure it and who – and what – deserves the credit. Wide ranging and a pleasure to read.

  timharford.com

Co-founder, chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Hosts the Masters in Business podcast for Bloomberg and wrote How NOT to Invest.

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  How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

  Their words

  These were the best books I read in 2020 (including who recommended each). Every one was a pleasure. Enjoy!

  ritholtz.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

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  The "lazy peasant" is a slander of the leisured classes: pre-modern farmers stopped short of maximum effort because their priorities were not served by more of it.

  Their words

  This isn’t because they are ‘lazy’ – the ‘lazy peasant’ (or poor worker generally) is a standard hypocrisy of the literature of the leisured aristocratic class towards poor farmers, today and in the past – but because they have priorities which are simply not served by labor maximization.

  acoup.blog