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Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.

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  Germany's crisis is too deep to be solved by conventional tax, spending, or regulatory adjustments.

  Their words

  Germany is in trouble. But the trouble goes deep and cannot be addressed by "more of the same" socio-economic measures in the domain of taxes or social spending or regulation.

  adamtooze.substack.com

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

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  The insistence that any education innovation must serve everybody at once and for free is the poison that stops education innovating at all.

  Their words

  in education there's a concept that I think is really poison and why we have trouble innovating in education which is there's a view that you must serve everybody all at once for free like just anything you do in education no matter who it's for they're like I'm going to come up with a counter example where it doesn't work for everybody all at once for free and that's not how products are developed

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Novelist and writer on craft; wrote The War of Art, Gates of Fire and The Legend of Bagger Vance.

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  Finishing one piece of work, even a failed one, permanently removes the difficulty of finishing.

  Their words

  Once you finish—even one time, even on a project that ultimately fails—you will never have trouble finishing again.

  The Drive to Finishstevenpressfield.com

Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

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  A cabin in literature typically serves as an escape from trouble or a place where new trouble is found.

  Their words

  The cabin is a classic literary setting. It's the getaway spot where characters can flee to escape their troubles or journey to in order to find new ones.

  Processing: How Josh Riedel Edited Thirty Cabinscountercraft.substack.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

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  It is very hard to actually get stuck, because the action space is always larger than it appears.

  Their words

  Now, the good news is that in my experience, it's very difficult to actually get stuck. Um, you can get yourself into trouble and the action space is always larger than it appears.

  Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com

Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

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  People who vibe-code a replacement for a product will rebuild the visible tip of the iceberg and then discover the downstream problems they never knew existed.

  Their words

  So, we're going to see people get into those where they're like, "Well, I vibe code the tip of the iceberg. I throw away the rest of the iceberg and now I'm in trouble because now I don't know what to do. Now I get to these downstream problems that I didn't even know existed." So, we're going to see on the on the side of the the the vibe coding replacers, we're going to see that kind of a naivity play out.

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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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  People disagreeing about AI capability are speaking past each other, because they are using models of very different tiers on very different kinds of task.

  Their words

  TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other.

  @karpathy on Xx.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.

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  The trouble with AI as a development tool is that it is overconfident in what it delivers, and its hit rate is nowhere near good enough.

  Their words

  The problem with AI right now is it’s overconfident in what it tries to deliver.

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Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.

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  The genius of writing was the moment somebody realised a picture could stand for a sound rather than for a thing.

  Their words

  And once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, that’s the crucial thing, that a picture of a foot not only meant foot but it meant the sound of the word for foot.

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Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  Wooden Bath Mat

  Their words

  Despite her McPersnickety ways, I had to admit that the wooden bath mat was magical. It dried within minutes and felt a lot less gross on my feet than a glorified carpet collecting everybody's foot germs.

  mariandrew.substack.com

Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.

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  Fantastic Four

  Their words

  Fantastic Four. It was ok? Aside from a few things, I’m having trouble getting excited about post-Infinity Saga Marvel. There was just a special alchemy about that whole arc that is proving impossible to reproduce. (B)

  kottke.org

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

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  A freemium product's free tier should sample everything the paid product can do, because a limited free experience teaches users the product is limited.

  Their words

  and so I think this is interesting just modernization learning that especially if you work on a premium product try to have your free product be a reflection of like everything that your product can offer you. Obviously, to an extent, there's some costs involved with some of the paid features and things like that, but it generally will pay it for itself if you're able to put your best foot forward um and go do that.

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

From one piece Dave Hone: T-Rex, Dinosaurs, Extinction, Evolution, and Jurassic Park | Lex Fridman Podcast #480 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  T. rex never ran in the biomechanical sense — it was a power walker that always kept one foot on the ground.

  Their words

  And yeah, big theropods, T-rex, is going to be a power walker. It's not going to run in the conventional biomechanical sense where both feet are off the ground at once.

  youtube.com

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  T. rex hunted by endurance rather than speed: its foot is built for efficiency, which points at long-distance pursuit, not a sprint.

  Their words

  They're relatively efficient compared to a lot of other things, and particularly compared to the herbivores, so that means they're probably looking at long distance rather than speed.

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Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

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  As search turns into an AI interface, a company with no earned acquisition channel on its roadmap is in serious trouble within one to two years.

  Their words

  Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the utmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth road map, you're going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up.

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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.

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  TLDR Newsletter

  Their words

  The most interesting stories in tech, science and coding summarized, daily.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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

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  Most people find writing hard because writing well requires thinking clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.

  Their words

  The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.

  Writes and Write-Notspaulgraham.com

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

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  Responsible scientists try to disprove their own theories, and archaeology keeps stepping out of that box.

  Their words

  And as responsible scientists, we’re trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That’s one more foot out of the science box that archeology often steps.

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Historian of Ukraine at Harvard; wrote The Gates of Europe, Chernobyl and The Russo-Ukrainian War.

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  The Russian language is not persecuted in Ukraine, and believing that it is has one important precondition: never having set foot in the country.

  Russia

  Their words

  So, imagine under those conditions and context that someone is persecuting ethnic Russians or Russian speakers. One, to believe in something like that, one important precondition is never to step your foot in Ukraine.

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Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

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  Xi Jinping is mostly right about the problems he identifies, and his government's brute-force solutions reliably make them worse.

  government

  Their words

  The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things.

  2023 letterdanwang.co

Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.

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  Vertical farming swaps a land problem for an energy problem, and the energy cost is what stops it feeding the world.

  energy

  Their words

  I explain why in the essay; the TLDR is that they’re energy hogs. The sun is a really awesome source of calories, and it’s kind of dumb not to take advantage of it.

  The Food Problem Is Bigger Than Lettucemichaelgrunwald.substack.com

Software engineer writing about maintenance, open source and the industrial reality of software — the author of "I am not a supplier".

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  Maintainers of widely used open source software are not adequately funded, and that is a real and unsolved problem.

  open source

  Their words

  Hell even worse, a lot of the libraries that underpin the fabric of what we all call the digital economy have trouble getting enough money to pay for food.

  I am not a suppliersoftwaremaxims.com

Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.

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  Decision-bias research is itself biased, studying only how heuristics fail and never the strength they supply.

  Their words

  Um but nobody has done research on the positive side of these heuristics. And so, I think that's a bias on the part of the decision bias researchers that they're only looking at the down arrow. How do these heuristics get us in trouble? And they're not looking at the strength of these heuristics.

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Writer on time, productivity and limitation; wrote Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and the newsletter The Imperfectionist.

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  People cannot thrive while their primary psychological identification is with the news cycle rather than with their own lives.

  Their words

  The trouble is that human beings can't really function, let alone thrive, when their primary psychological identification is with things like "the news cycle" or "history" or "the course of world events."

  The news is not your lifeoliverburkeman.com