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Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

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  Scientific and academic evaluation will shift away from published papers as the measure of output, toward valuing real-world results.

  Their words

  I predict that, over time, the focus will move away from "papers as the final output."

  AI is breaking the academic sorting machinelemire.me

Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.

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  Time spent on bureaucratic paperwork is a real economic cost even though it doesn't appear in government budgets.

  government

  Their words

  it is simply ridiculous that a ruinously expensive policy can be budget-neutral if the expense consists of wasted time rather than wasted money. But that's still a cost!

  Longreads + Open Threadthediff.co

Founder and editor of ToolGuyd, a tool review site covering power tools, hand tools, workshop equipment and EDC gear. He writes under his first name on the site.

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  Lowe's ToughBuilt StackTech tool boxes are overpriced and will go unsold until the line is discontinued.

  Their words

  The prices seemed too high. I foresee the entire line collecting dust until Lowe's moves on (again).

  I Visited My Favorite Lowe’s Storetoolguyd.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  This is the best time there has ever been to be an open source maintainer.

  open source

  Their words

  So, in my opinion, this is the absolute best time to ever have been an open source software maintainer. Not only do we get this wealth of glorious pull requests made by agents with all the boxes ticked, we also get to tap into a creativity of people who did not have access to contribute to a project before.

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

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  Programmers should be reading research papers and crawling their references, and the fact that almost none of them do is a bigger gap than any book recommendation could close.

  Their words

  I want to recommend that people read a paper. I'm trying to get more people to just to just read papers because I realized I read a ton of papers.

  youtube.com

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

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  A growing fraction of social media is AI slop influencers being replied to by bots — an echo of an echo of an echo.

  Their words

  An increasing fraction of social media consists of slop influencers using AI to make posts and bots replying to them. An echo of an echo of an echo

  @fchollet on Xx.com

Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

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  A robot going down a wrong path is not producing training data; the efficient move is for a human to intervene and show the recovery.

  Their words

  and trying to fold two boxes together isn't useful data that will teach the model how to get better at the task. And so that would be kind of wasting a lot of time on the robot attempting to go down the wrong path for solving the problem. And so instead of spending a lot of time trying to do that task, what we'll do is we'll actually have a human intervene and show the robot what to do and how to recover from that situation.

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Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.

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  AI systems will remain black boxes that are hard to understand and predict.

  Their words

  AIs will remain black boxes, hard to understand and hard to predict.

  Worldbuilding with Spatial Intelligencekk.org

Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.

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  AI-generated junk papers risk overwhelming the hep-th physics field with worthless content.

  Their words

  The result is something completely worthless, but not obviously distinguishable from many other things on hep-th, which is in serious danger of going from something sad and unhealthy to something completely overwhelmed with crud.

  Various and Sundrymath.columbia.edu

Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.

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  Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches

  Their words

  His sketches are often little more than scribbled boxes, circles, and arrows, but many will make you smile, some will make you laugh, and all will make you think.

  jasonzweig.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

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  A stream of AI-written papers with any error rate at all becomes insufferable, because finding the error costs more than the paper is worth even at ninety-nine percent.

  Their words

  It becomes insufferable like as a mathematician because you you would basically be like I'm every single time I see one of these I kind of don't know if it's worth my time even if 99 out of 100 of them are right.

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Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

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  No single person can understand a result like the Higgs boson in depth, and that is what a paper with a thousand authors actually means.

  Their words

  and I don't think it's possible for one person to understand everything in depth. Lots of people understand broadly a lot of these ideas but they don't understand sort of everything in in the depth that is actually utilized. That's why there's these, you know, papers with with well over a thousand authors.

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Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

From one piece Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Within a decade AI will do the bulk of what mathematicians spend their time on, and we will discover that was never the important part of the job.

  Their words

  Um I think with within a decade, a lot of things that mathematicians currently do um we we spend a lot of the bulk of our time doing and a lot of stuff we put in our papers today can be done by AI. Um but we will find that that actually wasn't the most important part of what we do.

  youtube.com

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  AI has made his papers richer and broader, but not deeper.

  Their words

  Uh yeah, so it's it's made papers sort of richer and broader, but not necessarily deeper.

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Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

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  AI researchers should contribute ideas but stop enacting them: a single queue of ideas and automated workers should run the experiments.

  Their words

  But okay, they shouldn't actually be enacting these ideas. There is a queue of ideas and there's maybe an automated scientist that comes up with ideas based on all the archive papers and GitHub repos and it funnels ideas in or researchers can contribute ideas, but it's a single queue and there is workers that pull items and they try them out.

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Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

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  The United States is good at high-volume manufacturing and bad at low-volume manufacturing, and that is what its industrial weakness actually consists of.

  America

  Their words

  The US excels at high-volume manufacturing, but not low-volume manufacturing.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

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  AI does not remove a job so much as change what it consists of, and knowing exactly where a model's capabilities stop is now part of being a good engineer.

  Their words

  take prompting and as an engineer, there's a range of prompting abilities. uh the way you discretize and split up your task matters. And if you assume that uh a model can do more than it can do, then you're going to have a bad time.

  youtube.com

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

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  Economics journals have made large datasets and heavy statistics the price of making any causal claim at all, which has squeezed qualitative economic history out of the field.

  Their words

  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.

  Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobelageofinvention.xyz

Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

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  The papers claiming Spinosaurus was a diver or a strong swimmer rest on very weak evidence at best.

  Their words

  So Spinosaurus is a super weird and exaggerated version of what was already a kind of super weird group of theropods. So Spinosaurus is properly strange. And then, as you kind of hinted at, super controversial as well, because various papers have claimed it's a diver or a really good swimmer, and I think the evidence for that is very weak at best.

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Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

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  Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

  Their words

  One of my favorite papers about prompt injection is Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

  simonwillison.net

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

From one piece Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #472 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  His prediction that research-level mathematics papers would be written in collaboration with AI by 2026 has already come true.

  Their words

  There are certainly math results which could only have been accomplished because there was a human authentication and an AI involved, but it's hard to disentangle credit. I mean, these tools, they do not replicate all the skills needed to do mathematics, but they can replicate some non-trivial percentage of them, 30, 40%, so they can fill in gaps.

  youtube.com

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  When formalising a proof costs no more than writing it, mathematics will flip: papers written in Lean first, and journals refereeing only for significance because correctness is certified.

  Their words

  And that's a phase shift, because suddenly it makes sense when you write a paper to write it in Lean first, or through a conversation with AI, which is generally on the fly with you, and it becomes natural for journals to accept.

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Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.

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  Success on the easy version of a task is evidence of nothing, because it seduces you into believing the model found a general solution when it did not.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Worse, as the latest Apple papers shows, LLMs may well work on your easy test set (like Hanoi with 4 discs) and seduce you into thinking it has built a proper, generalizable solution when it does not.

  A knockout blow for LLMs?garymarcus.substack.com

Engineering leader and writer; wrote The Manager's Path and Platform Engineering, and blogs at Elided Branches.

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  A career ladder must not be a checklist that guarantees promotion, because a promotion depends on the organisation’s needs as much as on the employee’s skills.

  Their words

  You should not try to create a ladder that functions as a pure checklist or scorecard that guarantees promotion if people check enough boxes; promotions are as much about the needs of the organization as the skills of the employees.

  10 Years of Engineering Ladderselidedbranches.com

Historian of the Second World War; wrote Normandy '44 and Brothers in Arms, and co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast.

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  The Western Allies fought with steel rather than flesh: no more than 14 to 15% of an Allied army was infantry, and 45% of it was service troops.

  Their words

  Yet actually they’re a comparatively small proportion of the army. So no more than 14 to 15% of any army, Allied army, is infantry. 45% are service corps, service troops, driving trucks and cooks and bottle washers and people lugging great big boxes of stuff.

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Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

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  Nobody really believes there is a firewall at the event horizon, but the firewall papers were what stopped the field from stalling.

  Their words

  I don’t think anyone really believes that at the event horizon you’ll find a firewall. But it did lead to things like the entangled wormholes embroidering a black hole, which was born out of an attempt to address the concerns that AMPS raised. So it did lead to progress.

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Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

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  CiteSeer

  Their words

  Online library of research papers.

  worrydream.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

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  Founder mode breaks the rule that a CEO engages with the company only through direct reports, and makes skip-level meetings the norm.

  Their words

  Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports.

  Founder Modepaulgraham.com

Indian software developer working with React and TypeScript; writes and publishes a newsletter at sreetamdas.com.

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  1Password

  Their words

  1Password password manager which really checks off all the right boxes

  sreetamdas.com

Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.

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  Reading and listening are only preparation; learning happens by doing, and it consists of failing on the way to mastery.

  Their words

  The only way to learn is by doing things. That we can read about how to swim and we can read about how to make uh uh uh a vegetarian maki roll, but you will not learn how to do it until you do it. And the reading, the listening is important preparation, but learning is the act of failing on our way to mastery.

  youtube.com

Designer, product manager, YouTuber and developer who has written about technology at Birchtree since 2010. He makes the Quick Reviews and Quick Notes apps and the A Better Computer YouTube channel.

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  Arc

  Their words

  I know it doesn’t click with everyone, but as someone who lives in their browser most of the day, I really need one that’s fast, reliable, and a joy to use, and Arc checks all those boxes for me.

  thesweetsetup.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

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  Gatekeeping in science stamps out the best research along with the worst, because reviewers are least likely to approve what is novel or risky.

  Their words

  Reviewers are less likely to greenlight papers and grants if they’re novel, risky, or interdisciplinary.

  Science is a strong-link problemexperimental-history.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

From one piece The rise and fall of peer review 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Peer reviewers miss most of the serious errors in the papers they review.

  Their words

  Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this.

  The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com

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  Fraudulent papers pass peer review routinely, which is direct evidence that peer review does not do the job it is supposed to do.

  Their words

  In fact, we’ve got knock-down, real-world data that peer review doesn’t work: fraudulent papers get published all the time.

  The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

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  Default cloud backup has quietly put a copy of nearly everyone’s private papers in a few data centres, and that is a surveillance weapon.

  data centers

  Their words

  It terrifies me, because these data repositories are not only a risk to individual user privacy, they’re effectively a surveillance super-weapon.

  Why encrypted backup is so importantblog.cryptographyengineering.com

Founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute; writes the history and philosophy of progress, after a career as a software engineering manager and founder.

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  Progress used to run in several industries at once and now runs in one, which is what the slowdown actually consists of.

  Their words

  It’s that we went from five simultaneous technology revolutions to one.

  Technological stagnationrootsofprogress.org

Writes Nintil, long researched essays on metascience, biology, economics and whatever he has decided to read the literature on.

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  Pre-grant peer review predicts which research will have impact substantially better than chance does.

  Their words

  I have reviewed before the effectiveness of peer review at figuring out "what's good" in the context of grant awards, finding that peer review as currently practiced does substantially better than chance at predicting future impact, especially for the most impactful of the papers; but at the same time is is far from perfect, leaving plenty of variance unexplained.

  nintil.com

Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.

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  Adobe Acrobat Reader

  Their words

  To read papers, I use Adobe Acrobat Reader and sync them in the cloud. This lets me read, highlight, and sync my papers across devices (work laptop, personal laptop, iPad). Instapaper does the same for online articles.

  eugeneyan.com

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  Instapaper

  Their words

  To read papers, I use Adobe Acrobat Reader and sync them in the cloud. This lets me read, highlight, and sync my papers across devices (work laptop, personal laptop, iPad). Instapaper does the same for online articles.

  eugeneyan.com

Photographer and writer based in Malaysia who publishes long-form camera, lens and photography-book reviews, essays and photoessays at blog.mingthein.com.

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  Creativity consists of curiosity combined with the foresight to imagine what a new combination of ideas could produce.

  Their words

  I believe creativity is really two parts: curiosity and the ability to not just ask "what if?", but also use some foresight to imagine the potential outcome.

  What is creativity?blog.mingthein.com