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Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Drug companies pile onto the same few already-validated targets, so far less of biology gets explored than could be.

  Their words

  In biomedicine we have a problem called target herding: most companies chase the same biological targets because they are de-risked, which means we explore far less of the biological space than we could.

  Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com

AI researcher at OpenAI; built the poker systems Libratus and Pluribus and the Diplomacy agent Cicero, and works on reasoning models.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An outsider could have disproved the Erdős unit-distance conjecture with a public model, because nobody had tried spending $100,000 of compute on one question.

  Their words

  Um but it would be possible and it would have been possible for somebody to disprove the erdos unit distance conjecture before we did using a general purpose model. And nobody had explored sufficiently what happens if I put $100,000 worth of compute into 5.5 what could it do?

  youtube.com

Behavioural economist at Chicago Booth, professor of behavioural science and economics and director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The worst AI employment scenario is not a crash but a slow drip, where people are quietly re-absorbed into worse-paid work over twenty years.

  Their words

  I think in some ways like one of the worst scenarios is a drip scenario because of the political economy piece. Right? Because like you know, people essentially what you what you might see is like people not really being unemployed in mass, but kind of like moving into sectors that pay them less money, kind of basically getting uh what happened with phone operators in in in the mid-century of the of the between 1920 and 1940, phone operators were completely automated, right? But it took 20 years even though the technology existed.

  youtube.com

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Examples in documentation should be compiled and run as tests, so that changing the code breaks the docs instead of quietly outdating them.

  documentation

  Their words

  Now the thing is you can of course write examples in your documentation and Rust makes all examples into tests. This means that if you change the underlying code now your test fails. And so this means that you can't even you can't forget to update your examples in your documentation.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Harder is easier: committing up front to quality, ethics or safety pays back in rewards you cannot get by chasing the reward.

  Their words

  harder is easier is a principle that says if you're willing to do the work upfront to commit to quality, to design, to ethics, to integrity, to safety, whatever the thing, I don't want to tell you what your values are, you tell me what they are. If you're willing to be principled in your decision-making, you will get these unexpected rewards.

  youtube.com

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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  Most of the tech tree will never be explored by anyone at all, which is exactly why the choice of which direction to explore matters so much.

  Their words

  Um, there's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be uh, discovered and when it you know, not only we, but but nobody ever is going to to discover most of them. So, choices about how to make how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.

  youtube.com

Researcher on developer productivity; co-wrote Accelerate and the DORA research, and created the SPACE framework.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You cannot mandate a tool developers dislike — they will quietly spin up the one they wanted.

  Their words

  I'm going to sound old when I say this, but like I one time had a company tell me, "Oh, well, they have to use that CI/CD system." I'm like 20 bucks, they're just spinning up Jenkins. And they were, right?

  youtube.com

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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  When no technique works and the AI starts suggesting things, chasing those suggestions down usually wastes more time than it saves.

  Their words

  Um and then they can kind of suggest random things and it it but it it it um often I find that trying to chase them down and make them work and find they don't work, it wastes more time than it saves.

  youtube.com

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Weathering a firehose of criticism is now part of a creator's skillset, and it is quietly removing creators whose work the world will therefore never see.

  Their words

  Now part of the skillset is being able to weather like a fire hose of criticism like the world has never seen.

  youtube.com

Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most of the companies now selling a transport technology will quietly disappear, and the survivors will redefine what they are doing without renaming it.

  Their words

  As with self driving cars, most of the early players in humanoid robots, will quietly shut up shop and disappear. Those that remain will pivot and redefine what they are doing, without renaming it, to something more achievable and with, finally, plausible business cases.

  Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01rodneybrooks.com

Vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, the advertising agency; author of Alchemy (2019) and the Wiki Man columnist at The Spectator.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cutting a job defined by its narrowest function destroys the tacit value that job was quietly creating.

  Their words

  the dorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one. You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel. There are loads and loads of value creation components to that dorman which aren't captured in the open the door definition.

  youtube.com

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Singer of Tales

  Their words

  That question is explored in another extraordinary book, Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales

  programmablemutter.com

Freelance research analyst and writer of the blog Aceso Under Glass, known for 'epistemic spot checks' of non-fiction claims.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Much of the wasted iteration in industrial process improvement comes from failing to recognize interactions between factors.

  Their words

  There is a feeling that a lot of tail-chasing in industrial improvement is due to interactions not being recognized.

  The Boring Part of Bell Labsacesounderglass.com

Writer and technology executive; blogs at anildash.com, was CEO of Glitch, and helped build Movable Type and ThinkUp.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A generated answer that looks like a page of search results but contains no link to the subject's own site has quietly removed the web from the reader's view.

  Their words

  I had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all.

  ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Webanildash.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Quietly dropping physical work from the definition of AGI is a major concession, not a clarification.

  AGI

  Their words

  Now, number one, the first concession that people make all the time is they just take out all the physical stuff because we're just talking about digital knowledge work. I feel like that's a pretty major concession compared to the original definition which was like any task a human can do.

  youtube.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Educational miracles are manufactured by selection: the students who would have scored badly are quietly moved off the books.

  Their words

  That’s how educational miracles are manufactured: through artificially creating selection bias, which is the most powerful force in education.

  There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com

Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A good tool raises the floor of what people can build without lowering the ceiling, and almost every tool quietly lowers the ceiling.

  Their words

  what you are try like trying to do as a tool maker, as an infrastructure builder, um as a product maker is you want to make a uh tool that brings the floor up significantly, but doesn't constrain the ceiling. And that is extremely hard.

  youtube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  He works as a fox, not a hedgehog: moving between fields, chasing analogies, and re-proving results he likes with the tools he favours.

  Their words

  I'm much more comfortable with the fox paradigm. Yeah. So yeah, I like looking for analogies, narratives. I spend a lot of time… If there's a result, I see it in one field, and I like the result, it's a cool result, but I don't like the proof, it uses types of mathematics that I'm not super familiar with, I often try to re-prove it myself using the tools that I favor.

  youtube.com

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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Chasing Hope

  Their words

  Chasing Hope made me think a lot about what kind of person chooses to run toward the hardest problems—and keep going back until they’re solved.

  gatesnotes.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Language models are already a form of AGI; what the labs are chasing is a further step, not the arrival of general intelligence.

  AGI

  Their words

  I think my personal definition of AGI is much simpler. I think language models are a form of AGI and all of this super powerful stuff is a next step that's great if we get these tools. But a language model has so much value in so many domains that it's a general intelligence to me.

  youtube.com

Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Subscription platforms like Substack and OnlyFans tend to become a Girardian bubble, where a few visible successes obscure the many who quietly give up after failing to build an audience.

  Their words

  I suspect that both Substack and OnlyFans may become a Girardian bubble. Everyone joins after hearing from the few people who succeed; the thousands who slink away after months of effort netted them a mere 17 subscribers usually do so quietly.

  putanumonit.com

Software engineer and essayist who writes about programming, formal methods, philosophy and literature at thoughts.wyounas.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Principles of the SPIN Model Checker

  Their words

  This book gave me both insight and a deeper curiosity about the subject. This book introduces the SPIN model checker and exposes the reader to the nuances of verifying programs using SPIN. A nice feature of the book is how it explains concepts using thoughtfully developed, freely available tools (such as jSpin) that the author created for pedagogical purposes. It's a demanding book, but the content was interesting. The book presents details about concurrency, temporal logic, non-determinism, advanced SPIN topics, and even case studies. I've already written a few blog posts about the topics I explored while reading this book, and I plan to write more. Overall, it's a good book. I'm sure I'll revisit the latter half again.

  thoughts.wyounas.com

Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI answer engine; previously a research scientist at OpenAI and a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Owning the dominant model is not worth chasing, because no user has ever cared which model produced a good answer.

  Their words

  Does the user care if Perplexity has the most dominant model in order to come and use the product? No. Does the user care about a good answer? Yes. So whatever model is providing us the best answer, whether we fine-tuned it from somebody else’s base model or a model we host ourselves, it’s okay.

  youtube.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most book authors optimise for the status of being published, chasing bestseller lists and reviews instead of the reader.

  Their words

  The authors of most books are looking for many of the magical elements of status that come from successfully being published. They pay attention to the bestseller list. They game it. They pay attention to reviews. They uh worry about what their friends think of the book, even though their friends don't read books.

  youtube.com

Partner at Collaborative Fund and author of The Psychology of Money, Same As Ever and The Art of Spending Money. Writes essays on investor behavior and posts frequently on X.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Money is used either as a tool for a better life or as a yardstick of status, and most people aim at the first while chasing the second.

  Their words

  There are two ways to use money. One is as a tool to live a better life. The other is as a yardstick of status to measure yourself against others.

  A Few Thoughts on Spending Moneycollabfund.com

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Flat, manager-free organisations do not deliver the equality they promise: they get abandoned, and the informal power left behind is unaccountable.

  Their words

  On the other hand, the manager-free experiments I’m aware of (e.g. holacracy at Medium and GitHub, or “Choose Your Own Work” at Linden Lab) have all been quietly abandoned or outgrown.

  charity.wtf

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Bacteria never became complex because the barrier is structure, not information — they explored genetic space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes and still got stuck.

  Their words

  So they have explored genetic sequence space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever did because they’ve had twice as long at least, and they’ve got much larger populations, and they never got around this problem. So why can’t they? It seems as if you can’t solve it with information alone. So what’s the problem? The problem is structure.

  youtube.com

Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The climate policy everyone has quietly assumed is that poorer countries stay poor, and that is the wrong answer.

  Their words

  From these exchanges I got the impression that they were unaware of just how unequal and poor (yes, poor) the world is today and what would be the trade-offs if we really were to decide to fix the volume of goods and services produced and consumed in the world at the current level.

  glineq.blogspot.com

Founder and CEO of the search engine DuckDuckGo, and co-author of the books Traction and Super Thinking.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Chrome

  Their words

  I use all the Web browsers a lot since I'm constantly chasing browser bugs, and don't currently really like any of them though I lean towards Chrome (but currently am annoyed at it because it keeps crashing on me).

  usesthis.com