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Gear reviewer who publishes long-form hi-fi audio and camera equipment reviews, plus video reviews, at stevehuffphoto.com.

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  Pure Class A amplifier design produces a richness and sweetness that other amplifier designs cannot fully replicate.

  Their words

  A pure Class A amplifier delivers a certain richness and sweetness that other designs cannot quite replicate, as hard as they may try.

  Luxman L-100 Centennial Review. Class A Returns.stevehuffphoto.com

Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

From one piece My Frustration With Puzzlebox Television 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Fully revealing a mystery-box show's central plot often disappoints viewers, flattening everything that happened before it.

  Their words

  Once the entire plot is revealed in shows like this one, it can be a letdown, flattening what has happened previously.

  My Frustration With Puzzlebox Televisiondanieldrezner.substack.com

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  For a mystery-box TV show to work, its world-building must be imaginative and believable and its characters compelling.

  Their words

  For them to work, the world-building has to be imaginative and believable, and the characters have to be compelling.

  My Frustration With Puzzlebox Televisiondanieldrezner.substack.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

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  Calling the fall in birth rates a mystery is not humility but obscurantism: there is already a good causal account of it.

  Their words

  we really do have a good causal model of how to think about fertility decline!

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

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

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  Models leak and algorithms get copied, but hundreds of millions of audited autonomous miles cannot be replicated — earned trust is the real moat.

  Their words

  Your your models can be leaked, algorithms can be replicated, but hundreds of millions of miles of fully autonomous operations in the real world, backed by evidence-grade evaluation and publicly audited proof, that is much, much more difficult to replicate.

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Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

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  A well-functioning contemplative practice should feel like an engaging encounter with mystery rather than a chore.

  Their words

  But it ought to feel good-like an engaging encounter with the mystery of being, not like a chore.

  sashachapin.substack.com

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

From one piece The Increasing Risk of Building in Public 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Deep, relationship-based customer moats remain something AI coding tools cannot replicate for a competitor.

  Their words

  No agentic coding tool is going to replicate that for your competitor.

  The Increasing Risk of Building in Publicthebootstrappedfounder.com

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  Product quality and software engineering ability no longer function as a competitive moat because AI can replicate them quickly.

  Their words

  But here's what I know for certain: product isn't a moat. Software engineering capability isn't a moat. Not anymore.

  The Increasing Risk of Building in Publicthebootstrappedfounder.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

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  The hard question is no longer how to build something but what to build, because anything already described can be replicated.

  Their words

  And the question nowadays is less about like how to build because if you can describe the problem in the solution you want, usually AI can do it. Maybe not today, but maybe like two or three years from now on they can do a lot of those. The question is like what to build because we talk about like yes, if something exists, right? AI can replicate it.

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Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

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  The durable competitive moat in an AI-driven business is proprietary human-originated data, not the AI itself.

  Their words

  The competitive moat for a business right now is not the use of AI. It's human-originating, high-quality, high-fidelity data that other systems can't replicate - even if they implement the exact same features and are built by the same agentic systems.

  AI Liability: The Landmines Under Your SaaSthebootstrappedfounder.com

China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.

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  Cahokia Jazz

  Their words

  A hard-boiled mystery set in an alternative 1920s America, by turns familiar and strange.

  andrewbatson.com

Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.

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  Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

  Their words

  And I love the podcast of the book’s authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000”

  braddelong.substack.com

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

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  Changing societal outcomes requires changing minds, and the credibility many diverse co-authors lend to a conclusion is hard to replicate with AI.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I think that changing societal outcome requires changing minds, and the "heft" that comes from many authors with different backgrounds endorsing a certain set of conclusions is hard to replicate with a link to a shared ChatGPT chat.

  Megapapers and How to Write Themmilesbrundage.substack.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  The Overnight Kidnapper

  Their words

  Mind-candy mystery from a highly reliable author.

  bactra.org

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.

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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.

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

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  Qualitative leaps in AI capability from merely scaling up models are a rational necessity rather than an empirical mystery.

  Their words

  While the fact that merely scaling up AI models often results in qualitative leaps in performance may seem empirically mysterious, in retrospect it should be seen as a rational necessity.

  Hegel and the AI Mindsecondbest.ca

Research scientist at Meta in Berlin working on multilingual models and evaluation; led the multilingual team at Cohere and was a research scientist at Google DeepMind before that.

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  The embodied, interactive, multi-modal nature of human first-language acquisition is hard to replicate in current AI models.

  Their words

  the embodied, interactive, and multi-modal nature of first language (L1) acquisition is challenging to replicate with current models.

  True Zero-shot MTruder.io

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  Dark Country

  Their words

  Mind candy horror/mystery, stalking and being stalked by the somewhat-supernatural serial killer, with extensive local color for contemporary South Africa. There are rough patches, but it's a perfectly enjoyable specimen of this type of novel. It's obviously the set-up for a series, and I'm not sure I need to follow these characters, but I would be happy to read more by Snyman.

  bactra.org

Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.

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  Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being

  Their words

  the Buddhist scientist Neil Theise endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us

  themarginalian.org

Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

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  Evernote

  Their words

  If you look at the sheer number of different methods for getting content into Evernote, it becomes clear how difficult it will be to replicate this functionality.

  fortelabs.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  Palm Beach Finland

  Their words

  Mind candy: black comedy crime fiction / murder mystery, in rural Finland. I enjoyed both the comic darkness and the convincing happy endings all around. (At least, happy by the characters' own lights...) My first Tuomainen, but I'd read more if they crossed my path and I was in the right mood.

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

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  Large replication projects answer the wrong question, because most individual studies do not matter either way.

  Their words

  There’s no point in picking some studies that are convenient to replicate, doing ‘em over, and reporting “only 36% of them replicate!”

  Science is a strong-link problemexperimental-history.com

Biochemist at University College London; writes about the origin of life and the role of energy in evolution, in The Vital Question and Transformer.

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  The Cambrian explosion is no longer much of a mystery; the big mystery left in biology is consciousness.

  Their words

  I don’t think there’s a big mystery. There’s lots of details that need to be filled in. The big mystery in biology is consciousness.

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