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20 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.
Their words
it is not true that modern institutional speech faces "no adversary": we have journalism, litigation, regulators, social media pile-ons, whistleblowers, and o on.
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braddelong.substack.com
17 September
President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.
In yesterday’s SOTEU speech, I made clear that the EU must continue applying pressure on Russia, taking every possible step to weaken its war machine. The adoption of the Graham Bill by the US House of Representatives sends a clear message. My friend, Senator Graham, strongly believed targeted and coordinated action on both sides of the Atlantic could make the difference in ending the war. I hope this important opportunity is seized, in the interest of peace. Europe Russia Related
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.
Given how wary academia (understandably) is of the effects of AI on many disciplines, it is particularly ironic that consuming its publications is so easy for the models (the world's knowledge is neatly serried in their pretraining corpora) and so cumbersome for most humans (with trenches of CAPTCHAs, accounts, and paywalls ensuring that only the unusually dedicated reader will ever make contact). Related
16 September
British historian, Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford; author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed.
Important speech by @GenGJenkinsRM about the realities of rising challenges in the Atlantic thetimes.com
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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.
🆕 blog! “How to get a DOI for your blog posts” Each new post on this blog now has a Digital Object Identifier. This post looks at the how and the why of getting one, whether it is useful, and any issues you might experience if you go down this path. Table of Contents Background A few years ago, I documented how to to get an International Standard… 👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/how-to-get-a-doi-for-your-blog-posts/ ⸻ #academia #citation #DOI #HTML #WordPress Related
15 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
The Clarity Act cloture vote has failed by a 49–50 margin; well short of the 60 votes needed. No Democrats crossed over to vote for the bill, and three Republicans voted against. Senator Collins’ (R-ME) NO vote on Clarity was the most surprising today. She was defending the bill to constituents as recently as last week. My guess is she did not believe the bill had a chance to pass, and was more worried about defending a yes vote as her re-election prospects look slimmer. #crypto #cryptocurrency #USpol #USpolitics crypto Related
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
There’s an impulse in American politics, a set of tactics and drives that has proven very effective at extinguishing speech. We once called it McCarthyism. Another time we called it Wokeism. One day in the future we will have some name for the campaign that is underway against all people who believe in serious AI risks, and whatever that name ends up being, it will be yet another name for that old impulse. It’s an ugly one. I recommend you avoid being a part of it, no matter your politics or your thoughts on AI. I suggest you think for yourself. You really do want to worry about the state pro… America Related
Researcher of social media, privacy and youth culture; founder of Data & Society and author of It’s Complicated.
Experts from academia and civil society regularly work for govt agencies for short periods to help them succeed. But Trump2 went further, installing partisan operatives to conduct projects to venerate the president. They're undermining the legitimacy of the agencies. wired.com
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Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.
13 September
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
I think that AI is helping us in ways that will only become clear in several years, as it is helping clarify knowledge, science and philosophy. In other words, I believe that it may usher in a new intellectual golden age, but not necessarily directly (by what “it” finds). Rather, it may force a reshaping of the current social hierarchies. Many people who have reigned over academia for decades are finding themselves on the defensive. Meanwhile, other models are slowly being valorized. If I am correct, we are in for quite a fight. It will get vicious. What I find interesting with OpenAI breakin… OpenAI Related
Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.
When does it become a speech? One person isn’t a lecture, it’s lunch. Three people is office hours. Six people is a seminar. At some point, we shift from interaction to performance–but the people are the same people, the very ones that were happy to…
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9 September
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
One only says this because many lines of poetry have been so internalized in our speech we don't realize we are quoting a poem at all. Did you know that the phrase "law of the jungle" came from a poem? How about the phrase "movers ans shakers"? There are many more examples. Quoting @number_pizza111 Yeats’s The Second Coming has to be, relative to length, the most quoted poem ever written. “Things fall apart,” “The centre cannot hold,” and “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity” are all referenced by people who haven’t even read it. Related
8 September
Chief AI Scientist at Databricks, after its acquisition of MosaicML, where he was a founding team member; known for the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis from his MIT PhD (ICLR 2019 Best Paper).
You can take the academics out of academia, but... Related
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.
6 September
Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.
Defending the Mechanistic Plausibility of Protracted and Delayed Antidepressant Withdrawal Guest post by Daniel Cohrs ( @DanielCohrsMD ) psychiatrymargins.com
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3 September
Zurich-based value investor who ran the Aquamarine Fund from 1997 to 2025 and wrote The Education of a Value Investor. He hosts the VALUEx gathering in Klosters and publishes a podcast and newsletter.
Amazing speech by @EinatWilf Quoting @EinatWilf “So do not dare propose that ‘Israel Never Truly Wanted Peace with Palestine’. If anything, we wanted it too much. So now, it is your turn to answer the question: When did you ever truly want peace with the one Jewish state?” (my 10 min speech with English captions from the Oxford Union Debate): Related
2 September
Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.
I use dictation tools like "Handy" that use local models to turn speech to text. I've got a fork/PR that adds screen annotation so you can say things like "help me understand 'this' or move 'this' to the left" and it'll put both text+annotation into agents wth a single key. Related
1 September
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since July 2026 and leader of the Labour Party. MP for Makerfield since a by-election in June 2026; Mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 before that.
We send our love and support to the Jewish community in Manchester and beyond who last night gathered to remember Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, who were killed defending their synagogue last year. My thoughts are with their families and all those who have been affected by the attack. I know for many Jewish people, the sorrow and fear from that day has not lifted and I know we must do more to protect communities across the country. I want Jewish people to know that their safety is a priority of mine and I’m determined to stamp out antisemitism for good. Related
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
27 August
Zurich-based value investor who ran the Aquamarine Fund from 1997 to 2025 and wrote The Education of a Value Investor. He hosts the VALUEx gathering in Klosters and publishes a podcast and newsletter.
Good job @BillWhiteUSA for standing up for free speech. Quoting @nathancofnas I am grateful to Rector Petra De Sutter for allowing me to stay at Ghent University. I look forward to continuing to work on the project, “The Future of Liberalism,” for 60% of my working time for the remainder of my one-year postdoc. I wish to personally thank Ambassador @BillWhiteUSA. It was beyo… Related
26 August
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Their words
This is very important because in the abstract, I think everyone says, "Yay, productivity. That's good." What did you think, this was all just vibes? No. Productivity means fewer people to do the same number or the same job. Now, the amount of job you want done may increase, and therefore you get more people, but it also may not.
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23 August
Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.
Their words
The people who want to censor (code, speech, money) are the bad guys.
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@naval on X x.com
21 August
Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.
14 August
Interactive fiction author and hacker; wrote Spider and Web and Hadean Lands, and designed the Glulx virtual machine.
Religious firestorm topic of the day: https://news.vt.edu/articles/2026/07/clahs-appalachia-speech-lab.html (Appalachian Gothic panel.) Related
NecronomiCon now labels itself as “The International Conference and Festival of Weird Fiction, Art, and Academia”, no longer a Lovecraft con specifically. And that is fair; the next panel I’m going to is “weird Appalachiana.” But Lovecraft sure does seem to be still the anchor and common thread. Related
9 August
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
well that sucks. apparently the ALA/Freedom To Read Foundation have trademarks on the phrase "free people read freely", which i use in a lino print i made into stickers a few years ago. i got the phrase from a 2023 speech by librarian and former ALA leader Tracie D. Hall. i didn't think to check if it was trademarked because, lol, what a wild thing to trademark. turns out the trademark had been granted two months before i made the print. it's no big deal from a business perspective — i don't sell these stickers for much more than they cost, because i mostly just think it's an important messag… Related
22 July
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
21 July
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
One pattern I find useful for working with LLMs is a nice long ramble session. Sometimes the LLM needs more bits to understand what you're trying to achieve, but you're too lazy to type them. In these cases I like to lean back, switch to /voice and just ramble for like 10 minutes, total mess, anything goes, full stream of consciousness. Sometimes I declare it up top, something like "switching to speech recognition sorry for any typos...". Sometimes I turn it into a small interview of a few turns. But I find that the LLMs are somehow very good at reconstructing long incoherent rambles and ofte… LLMs Related
16 July
Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.
12 July
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.
13 June
American historian of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust; author of Bloodlands, On Tyranny and On Freedom, and writer of the newsletter 'Thinking about...'.
18 May
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
22 April
Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
Their words
there I feel like in academia, I have the freedom to work on things that go against this commercial incentive of companies and say like, "Actually, no, I'm going to do what I think is right for the users."
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1 January
Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.
Their words
Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.
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razibkhan.com
15 December 2025
American author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Undoing Project, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.
10 October 2025
Emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London; wrote Strategy: A History and Command, and writes about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as they happen.
Europe
Their words
When the Ukrainians say that they are defending Europe’s borders they are correct.
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samf.substack.com
30 September 2025
Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.
government
Their words
That's how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens.
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youtube.com
19 August 2025
Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.
Their words
Charlie Jane Anders' Lessons in Magic and Disaster drops today: it's a novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. It's my kind of novel!
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pluralistic.net
28 April 2025
Co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face; writes about open models and where he thinks the field is wrong.
[Past weekends side project] A quick introduction to contextual speech models I made some interactive visualisations to explain a bit better how recent contextual speech models and audio tokenization work (e.g. Sesame's demo). Related
10 March 2025
Co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face; writes about open models and where he thinks the field is wrong.
We're super excited to introduce the Academia Hub! A game-changer for school, university, courses, research, projects, collaborations, publications. Learn more: huggingface.co/docs/hub/aca... It's a per-school offer, not individual => your faculty/admin have to apply Go schools, go universities! HuggingFace Related
11 February 2025
Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.
20 January 2025
President of the United States, the 45th from 2017 to 2021 and, as of 2026, the 47th; before politics a New York property developer who ran the Trump Organization, and the host of The Apprentice from 2004 to 2015.
25 October 2024
Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.
26 August 2024
Founder and editor of Techdirt; coined the Streisand effect, and writes on platform liability, speech law and copyright.
Their words
Without the details, though, it’s really difficult to know if this is an attack on free speech, or legitimate charges over actual criminal behavior.
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techdirt.com
22 March 2024
Investigative journalist; wrote Area 51, The Pentagon's Brain and Nuclear War: A Scenario, reconstructing what secret programmes actually did from interviews and declassified records.
Russia
Their words
But that was their official position, and that changed just two years ago when Putin gave a speech and he said that their position had changed, that they will no longer wait to absorb an attack.
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youtube.com
29 February 2024
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
I’m running a prototype Science House this summer! It’s a great opportunity for anyone looking to do research outside academia. No application, just do some science, post it on the internet, and send me the link. adammastroianni.com
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20 February 2024
Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.
government
Their words
So having an independently owned powerful platform is very important for truth, for free speech, for hearing the other side of the story, for counterbalancing the power of the government.
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youtube.com
28 November 2023
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.
20 November 2023
First Amendment lawyer and former federal prosecutor; writes The Popehat Report and explains what the law actually says when people shout about free speech.
From one piece
My Free Speech Means You Have To Shut Up
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
9 November 2023
Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.
Their words
So there’s a diversity of viewpoints and free speech only matters if people you don’t like are allowed to say things you don’t like. Because if that’s not the case, you don’t have free speech and it’s only a matter of time before the censorship has turned upon you.
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youtube.com
16 January 2023
Musician and writer; answers readers' questions weekly at The Red Hand Files, and fronts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
OpenAI
Their words
What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song.
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theredhandfiles.com
31 December 2022
Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.
13 December 2022
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
25 January 2022
Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Argues at length for building things, mostly in short form.
From one piece
Inside the Mind of A Famous Investor | Marc Andreessen
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
startups
Their words
A successful startup has about five years until they become a new incumbent. Um and and they actually start to behave like an incumbent. That's rational. Like of course that's rational. Like they've now built something worth defending.
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youtube.com
Google
Their words
I I would I would not say that about Google. I would just say that more generally like that is the incumbent temptation. Um it is is basically is basically go from attack mode to defend mode, right? Go from being the pirate to being the navy.
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youtube.com
22 November 2021
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.
Their words
Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset – A charming and original contribution to the genre on being open-minded and curious. Great stories and ideas, alongside a serious argument for the virtues of exploring rather than defending ideas.
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timharford.com
19 October 2021
Philosopher and historian of existential risk; wrote Human Extinction, and coined "TESCREAL" with Timnit Gebru for the cluster of ideologies they argue underpins the AI industry.
On changing their mind
I believe this needs to change because, as a former longtermist who published an entire book four years ago in defence of the general idea, I have come to see this worldview as quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.
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30 January 2021
Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.
Do words mean anything? The principle of absolute freedom of speech has embedded in it a basic premise that words do not inherently mean anything. This wasn’t obvious to me and felt surprising, in the this-must-be-wrong way, when I noticed it.…
Related
13 January 2021
Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
Decentralised content moderation Who is doing interesting work on decentralised content moderation? With Donald Trump suspended from Twitter and Facebook, and Parler kicked off AWS, there is renewed discussion about what sort of speech is acceptable on…
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Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
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