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British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.

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  Riding in a taxi with a human driver carries no genuine expectation of privacy, only reliance on the driver's discretion.

  Their words

  There's no privacy expectation although you might rely on their discretion.

  The expectations of privacy in driverless carsshkspr.mobi

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

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  The common failure is picking the technology with the fastest early ramp and extrapolating it, when that curve plateaus below what the product needs.

  Their words

  common failure mode is picking the tech that gives you the fastest early ramp, riding that steep curve, feeling like you're winning, projecting that, you know, steep slope into the future and feeling like the sky is the limit, and then hitting the plateau, and discovering that the technology path that you picked actually flattens out way before the performance that is required by your product.

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Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.

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  One or two record-warm years cannot distinguish rapid aerosol-driven acceleration in warming from a strong El Niño riding on the existing trend

  Their words

  it tells you that a single warm year, or even two, cannot distinguish between "very rapid acceleration driven by aerosols and high sensitivity" and "the trend and more modest acceleration plus a very strong El Niño."

  Why Hansen may end up being right about 2026theclimatebrink.com

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

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  Shortened versions of hard hobbies profit mainly from casual participants riding a legacy sport's superstar mythology, not from elite-level players.

  Their words

  It's interesting that the Shorter hobby businesses all draft off superstars in the legacy hobby, but make their vast majority of their money from people who will of course never come close to the level superstars - you'd still go to pickleball and talk Nadal vs Federer, you'd still go to Top Golf and make Tiger Woods jokes.

  Take a hard game, and make it shorterswyx.io

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

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  Chip export controls to China keep failing not because the case is weak but because there is too much money riding on the sale.

  China

  Their words

  The counterarguments against it are I'll politely call them fishy. Um, uh and yet it doesn't happen and we sell the chips because there's there's so much money. There's so much money riding on it.

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Co-founder and CEO of Until, a reversible-cryopreservation company, and previously the founder of the Longevity Fund.

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  Cryopreservation is tractable because ice formation is a probabilistic process you can steer, not a threshold that flips.

  Their words

  but ice sort of forms through a process of random nucleation and then extension. And this is cool because you can uh modulate the like sort of nucleation the rate of nucleation and extension to then modulate the probability of ice formation.

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Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

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  Duolingo's real competence is motivation and habit formation, and language learning was only the first thing it applied that to.

  Their words

  I actually in many ways see language learning as like their first vehicle. And what they have a superpower in is that again, the motivation, the habits, etc.

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Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

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  Personalised online entertainment has got good enough to crowd out socialising, and with it the forming of couples.

  Their words

  My suspicion is that massive improvement in quality of online entertainment crowd out socialising and development of social skills, possibly hurting relationship formation as well as desire for children within marriage.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

Energy and decarbonisation analyst; publishes an annual chart deck on the state of the transition, and was chief content officer at BloombergNEF.

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  Riding in a Waymo robotaxi is a better overall experience than being driven by a human driver.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  I found it to be a superior experience to a human driver, for a few key reasons.

  Inflecting and Overtaking, SunPower, Waymonathanielbullard.com

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

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  Life is not fighting the second law of thermodynamics; it surfs increasing entropy and depends on it to hold itself together.

  Their words

  Sometimes people think that complexity or life or whatever is fighting against the second law of thermodynamics, fighting against the increase of entropy. That is precisely the wrong way to think about it. We are surfers riding the wave of increasing entropy. We rely on increasing entropy to survive.

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