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Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Intelligence and Polanyi knowledge are mostly complements with fairly limited substitutability in producing output.

  Their words

  In the model, intelligence and Polanyi knowledge combine to produce output. Substitutability is fairly limited. For instance, if you have problems of norms in your office, a mere dose of AI-drenched technocratic knowledge does not usually solve those problems. Sometimes it even can make those problems worse, by empowering rent-seekers further. Intelligence and Polanyi knowledge are not quite Leontief complements, but they are mostly complements.

  A simple model of AI-aided economic growthmarginalrevolution.com

Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.

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  The models causing real problems today are closed-weight American ones; open-weight models would not create that issue.

  America

  Their words

  the models that are actually causing issues right now are all closed weight American models. I’m fairly certain if they were open weight models, we would not have that issue.

  P(doom)lucumr.pocoo.org

Pseudonymous reviewer who publishes measured, standardised flashlight and knife reviews at zeroair.org, including runtime, output and tint measurements.

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  Skilhunt H150V4 5000K

  Their words

  The Skilhunt H150V4 5000K headlamp is an outstanding headlamp. It's great for being neutral white, high CRI, running an included 14500 cell or AA, and having a great user interface. The price is fairly reasonable because of all those reasons and the great build quality!

  zeroair.org

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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  Making dramatic claims about contemplative experience helps sustain interest in a topic that is otherwise fairly dull.

  Their words

  Additionally, making bold declarations about the extremity of contemplative experience is a decent way to keep people talking about meditation, which can be a fairly boring subject.

  Biting the no-self bulletsashachapin.substack.com

Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.

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  Confident non-belief is rare in America: for every person sure God does not exist, about six are sure one does.

  America

  Their words

  Said another way, for every person who is pretty sure that God doesn’t exist, there are six who are fairly certain of the existence of a Higher Power. Non-believers are statistically rare.

  graphsaboutreligion.com

Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.

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  Social competence has to run automatically, because doing it deliberately imposes a cognitive load that becomes an impediment in itself.

  Their words

  you need to somehow internalize it and it has to be relatively effortless and automatic. It has to become automatic at some level and then you can move through life fairly smoothly in a socially very complex way.

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

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  Betting a robotics company on today's component prices is betting it on a number with a short shelf life.

  Their words

  So, betting your company, betting your approach on today's hardware prices is just betting your company on a number that has a fairly short shelf life and is going to expire.

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Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

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  Formal methods are a niche tool; property-based testing is the one most engineers should adopt, and stopping there is a fine place to stop.

  Their words

  I love formal methods, but I think it's a fairly niche tool for most people and I think like property-based testing is in general going to be useful for more people.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Professor of psychology at UCLA, where he studies human memory, attention and cognitive ageing, and author of Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.

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  Alzheimer's pathology in the brain does not settle whether a person has dementia: the nuns' brains were full of plaques and tangles while they went on functioning normally.

  Their words

  and you found that these nuns, how they aged, some of them certainly when they passed away, their brains had these kind of hallmark signs of dementia, plaques and tangles, but behaviorally they were still high functioning. So, it's really interesting that the hardware shows what we see as dementia and specifically Alzheimer's disease, but their behavior uh was that of a fairly healthy cognitive person.

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Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

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  In choosing what to learn, who is teaching it matters more than what it is, because your existing interests are fairly arbitrary and a good educator is not.

  Their words

  I feel like a relevant insight in learning was um recognizing that like who matters more than what. So, like advice to any college student when they're choosing what courses to take. Uh, care a little bit less about your pre-existing interests because they're kind of arbitrary right now. and care a little bit more about whether like the person teaching it is a good educator and someone you resonate with.

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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.

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  The Great When

  Their words

  It is an epic tale full of rogues and reprobates. The story is excellent even though the plot follows a fairly basic structure. Although set up to be a series, it is a satisfying stand-alone tale.

  shkspr.mobi

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

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  The papacy made Italy uniquely unstable in Europe, because each new pope inherited a precedent that he could overthrow any government he liked.

  Europegovernment

  Their words

  And soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to

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Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

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  Europe being locked out of US cloud services is still unlikely, but it is no longer unthinkable, and serious systems should be engineered against it.

  Europe

  Their words

  So, what if geopolitics was to go horribly wrong and tensions escalate and Europe find itself suddenly locked out of US cloud services? I hope that doesn't happen. I still think it's fairly unlikely, but it's no longer unthinkable.

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

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  Review became a worse bottleneck under AI, because companies removed the review automation they had once AI started writing the code.

  Their words

  And not only that, but like humans were already a bit of a bottleneck in the review process. Now it can be worse because things that we fairly straightforward changes that some companies had automation around reviewing, they've removed that reviewing because if AI is involved and they're worried about the verifiability or the reliability of the code.

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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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  An overnight automated search found tunings that two decades of hand-tuning experience had missed on an already well-tuned repository.

  Their words

  And I've gotten to a certain point and I thought it was like fairly well tuned and then I let auto research go for like overnight and it came back with like tunings that I didn't see.

  youtube.com

Chairman and chief executive of Microsoft since 2014; joined the company in 1992 and ran its cloud business before that.

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  There will always be a fairly capable open-source model in the world, which puts a permanent floor under what anyone can charge for one.

  Their words

  structurally I think there will always be an open- source model uh that will be fairly capable in the world that you could then use as long as you have something that you can use that uh with which is data uh and a scaffolding

  Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGIyoutube.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  Augmenting a general-purpose solver with domain-specific heuristics commonly gives it a meaningful performance boost.

  Their words

  My sense is that this hybrid is fairly common in practice; solvers aren't magical and if you can deduce additional structure using domain-specific analysis, it will often give the solver an important boost.

  Solving regex crosswords with Z3blog.nelhage.com

Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.

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  Complete reverse-engineering of neural networks is a less promising research direction than studying model biology and applying interpretability usefully

  Their words

  I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).

  MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29)neelnanda.io

Co-founder and chief executive of Sierra, chairman of the board of OpenAI, and formerly co-chief executive of Salesforce and chief technology officer of Facebook.

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  Even generalised superintelligence will change society more slowly than the AGI community expects, because intelligence is not the only rate limiter.

  AGIAI alignment

  Their words

  I don't think all parts of the economy can absorb intelligence equally. So let's just say we develop fairly generalized super intelligence. I always use the analogy like you can invent a lot of drugs, but if clinical trials still take a long time, you're not necessarily going to get new therapies rapidly.

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Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

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  A city's first rail line comes in at a reasonable cost and every line after it does not, because the follow-up outgrows the in-house team that oversaw the pilot.

  Their words

  So Portland managed to build one very small line for fairly reasonable costs, but they were not cutting edge; this is a common pattern to Western US cities, in that the first line has reasonable costs and then things explode, even while staying self-funded and self-directed.

  Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralizationpedestrianobservations.com

Economist writing on why technological progress slowed and what would restart it — energy, supersonic flight, housing and the regulations around them.

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  A large cargo airship is probably not fundable as a startup, because it stays capital-intensive and risky until late in development.

  startups

  Their words, before

  My suggested approach would be more capital intensive while retaining a lot of risk until fairly late in development. I am not sure it’s fundable.

  Their words now

  Cargo airship margins, therefore, can be much higher than I had realized.

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

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  Within a couple of decades there will not be many people who can write, because AI has removed the pressure to learn.

  Their words

  I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.

  Writes and Write-Notspaulgraham.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  Document similarity scores across a corpus tend to cluster bimodally near identical and near unrelated, rather than spreading evenly.

  Their words

  I suspect - but haven't verified - that in many corpora, we will encounter fairly bimodal Jaccard values - two clusters, near 1 and 0.

  blog.nelhage.com

Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.

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  Hit Man

  Their words

  Hit Man (US) 3.5 Highly entertaining due to its killer plot. So why not a higher rating? I was disappointed that Linklater did so little with the plot—much of the execution (not all) is fairly bland. Where’s the style? As a comedy, it’s only OK. As film noir, it’s nowhere near as intense as Body Heat. It’s sort of Soderbergh-lite. And yet more people will like this one than any other film on my list, because of the great plot.

  themoneyillusion.com

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  You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum

  Their words

  You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Japan, 1955, CC) 3.5 Chishu Ryu is one of my favorite actors, but he has a fairly small role. Very nice cinematography. Recommended for fans of nostalgia.

  themoneyillusion.com

Founder of OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world; later worked on mapping at Microsoft and Telenav.

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  AI-generated writing is already fairly good but still lacks the direction and insight of human editors.

  Their words

  As of today, computers write pretty good articles but lack the direction and insight of human editors.

  Encyclopaedia Automaticastevecoast.com

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

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  Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine

  Their words

  The statistics and anecdotes are fairly horrifying, and the sheer profusion drills in how widespread the famine was.

  gwern.net

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  The Black Company

  Their words

  I enjoyed the first book a great deal: it’s in a fairly stock medieval setting, but it handles the dark fantasy well

  gwern.net