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20 September
Librarian, technology instructor and writer in rural Vermont; longtime community manager at MetaFilter and author of a book on the digital divide.
Was making polite chitchat with a local older friend (who used to be sec. of state, no slouch) at an event yesterday. He tried to send me a video of Bernie talking about AI, how we were all cooked etc. I said "Why would I want to watch that? I'm not going to watch that." and he took offense as if I were the one who was being rude. It's been weighing on me today, feeling weird about being honest and/or rude here. I try to be agreeable, not poop in the punch bowl. But doomerism at a nice party? Related
19 September
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.
Nonogame will soar on the iPhone Duo Nonogame for the iPhone and iPad is out now, and I'm really excited about it. However, if I'm being honest, I have mostly played on my Samsung Galaxy Fold8 for the past few weeks because the experience is simply better…
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18 September
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
We gave web components an honest chance. Left terribly disappointed. Quoting @badlogicgames team decided to go all in on react. i never touched frontend stuff except for lit (don't @ me). perfect timing. thanks @odysseus0z ! Related
17 September
Web designer and writer; founded A List Apart and Happy Cog, co-founded the An Event Apart conference, and wrote Designing With Web Standards.
x.com When an “honest mistake” by an insurance company is so commonplace it can be fixed with a checkbox, yet fixing it requires a paid consultant, you have to wonder whether insurance companies exist to deliver healthcare at all. Related
Mastodon When an “honest mistake” by an insurance company is so commonplace it can be fixed with a checkbox, yet fixing it requires a paid consultant, you have to wonder whether insurance companies exist to deliver healthcare at all. Related
15 September
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
This is 100% the right thing to do The number one thing people say about my books is that they love reading my honest personal reflections. It enables them to connect to it If you water it down to pure ideas maybe you can crush a mass market but no one will connect with it Quoting @colossusjeremy I'm grateful to the readers complaining that I put myself in this piece too much, to which I say: -Human watermarks are more important now -I'm tired of gen z bullying everyone into fear of being cringe, we need to let it all hang out Related
14 September
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.
Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.
9 September
Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.
1 hour 18 minutes. Flew by. Good showing by Ternus. Quick honest reaction is: better than Cook at these keynotes, but lacks the off-the-cuff nature and energy of Jobs. It's early. But also we NEED to go back to live. iPhone Duo demos would have been awesome live. #AppleEvent energy Related
Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.
People often think these posts come from researchers who don’t truly believe them. I disagree, that’s not been my experience with Ant or OAI or any other researcher at or near the frontier. I find them to be intellectually honest in terms of believing what they say. However I don’t think any one company or community or discipline or school of thought should represent an entire industry that is so obviously critical. We need new and diverse sources of thought and epistemology here including in the terms we use. as an example: what do the creators of the open models think ( now many here and ab… Quoting @hilbertspaess I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below. Related
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.
“AI is full of scam artists. Why trust you?” Fair question. I’d be skeptical too Every new wave of technology attracts people who showed up last week with a new account and a course to sell So here’s my honest answer I’ve spent 13 years teaching people how to organize their thinking and do their best work I coined the term “Second Brain” and built the frameworks that came from it: PARA, CODE, and Progressive Summarization Two books based on those ideas have sold more than 500,000 copies in 25 languages And the ideas aren’t new They’ve been tested by 10,000+ alumni across 70+ countries, long b… Related
8 September
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.
Their words
They sure feel they are reducing human-to-human interaction via the code, I'll be honest
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@GergelyOrosz on X x.com
7 September
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.
24 August
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
There are many systems in the world where you have a quality distribution, call it normal for simplicity, and you are incentivized to maximize utilization at all points along it. You should not expect these systems to provide legible, accurate, honest positional rankings. Quoting @levelsio Airbnb deletes negative reviews so everything is always 4.7 Google Maps removes negative reviews in many countries as defamation so everything is always a 4.7 Booking sites want you to book so will also happily remove negative reviews for their hotels so everything is always a 4.7 I made a site cal… Related
21 August
Investment researcher and engineer who runs Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, writing on macroeconomics, currency systems and equity analysis.
Ironically my most successful job interview ever was the one I was least prepared for. It was last minute, basically no chance to get it, and I dropped all pretense and was just brutally honest and chill. Got the job. Related
20 August
Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.
Their words
People have spent huge amounts of time and money looking for drugs to restore vision or to restore hearing or to stop Parkinson's or to to help paralyzed people move again. Understanding the like the biology and the molecular detail required to make a drug has been very difficult. Humanity just isn't that good at that, to be totally honest.
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youtube.com
Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.
2 August
Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.
Their words
there are people who are really big on road maps and there are people who are really big on iteration. I I think the honest answer is you've got to do both. You can't over-index on either.
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youtube.com
28 July
Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Denver company building the Overture supersonic airliner and its Symphony engine.
Their words
so I I deeply believe that you should pick a problem that you want to go solve in the world and don't worry too much uh about the answer to why now. Uh the answer to why now can be because I started now.
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youtube.com
26 July
Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.
2 July
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
x.com Everybody hates AI mandates -- unsurprisingly, since most of them are terrible and poorly resourced. But they don't have to be terrible. A mandate plus enablement is the most honest and effective way to fund a lot of change on a tight timeline. charitydotwtf.substack.com
Related
Newsletter In defense of AI mandates When you need to execute a coordinated change on a tight timeline, a mandate is the best and most honest way to fund it.
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28 June
Release engineering manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. Keeps a public log at tylercipriani.com of every book he reads, with a rating and notes.
Saw this highlight while flipping through my copy of David McCullough's "John Adams," from a letter Adams wrote to his son: "Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not." – John Adams Related
2 June
Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.
If there were no more medical researchers or doctors because AI solved everything I would be thrilled. But if AI could do everything I do but better I would feel sad. I assume many doctors & medical researchers feel the opposite. I know my emotion is wrong but am being honest. Quoting @Jabaluck A shockingly common (implicit) view: "It would be better if the world's problems were not solved so that people can find purpose in solving these problems." Or for knowledge work, "It would be better if knowledge were unknown so there is more for humans to discover." These views seems absurd to me.… Related
27 May
Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.
15 May
Investigative journalist on policing, forensics and criminal justice; wrote Rise of the Warrior Cop and writes The Watch.
3 March
Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.
Their words
It is definitely my broadest and least inhibited book — and in my judgment, the best-written and the best overall.
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betonit.ai
13 February
Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.
data centers
Their words
on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.
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youtube.com
26 January
Writes Nintil, long researched essays on metascience, biology, economics and whatever he has decided to read the literature on.
25 November 2025
Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.
Their words
This part of Who Knew is raw and honest in a way most business memoirs usually aren’t.
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gatesnotes.com
21 November 2025
Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.
Intel is listening, don't waste your shot Intel's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has made listening to customers a top priority, saying at Intel Vision earlier this year: "Please be brutally honest with us. This is what I expect of you this week, and I believe harsh feed…
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Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.
3 November 2025
Co-founder of Panic, the Portland software company behind Transmit, Coda, Nova and the Playdate handheld console.
Started goofing around with mesh radios. Delighted to discover the tech immediately bifurcated into a slapfight between two competing protocols as per the ancient and sacred nerd traditions. Not having much luck with either of them to be honest. I can see lots of #meshtastic nodes from my home, but can't reliably communicate with any of them, and public channel is mostly silent. Not enough #meshcore coverage in my area for a fair try. Anyone else meshing in Portland? Related
8 September 2025
Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.
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