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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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Freedom of navigation is a global public good that decays once its guarantor is seen as unwilling to bear its cost.

  Their words

  Freedom of navigation is a global public good, and public goods decay the instant their provider is revealed to be unwilling to pay for them.

  braddelong.substack.com

Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

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  Fully revealing a mystery-box show's central plot often disappoints viewers, flattening everything that happened before it.

  Their words

  Once the entire plot is revealed in shows like this one, it can be a letdown, flattening what has happened previously.

  My Frustration With Puzzlebox Televisiondanieldrezner.substack.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  AI has passed nearly every human at finding security vulnerabilities, because the work is chaining together small flaws that are harmless on their own.

  Their words

  So the irony here is that when you look at that field, it seems like we've reached levels of intelligence that virtually no human can match because many of these security holes are about stringing combo moves together. You find one little vulnerability here that by itself might not be the worst thing in the world, but then you combine it with four others, and suddenly you have RCE, remote command execution. Humans who are able to do that are very rare.

  youtube.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

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  Resolving workplace conflict is better achieved by changing the relationship itself than by trying to change the other person.

  Their words

  This helped the leader shift from wanting to change Jacob-something they couldn't control-to taking responsibility for changing the relationship-something they could.

  Designing Better Working Relationshipsbringthedonuts.com

Short-story writer and novelist; won the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and teaches craft weekly in Story Club.

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  The only style worth having is the one you cannot help; setting out to develop a personal style is the wrong goal.

  Their words

  And that there might come a moment, while reading a new, just-edited-for-the-thousandth-time draft, where that true self, or voice, pops out at you, suddenly revealed, as if someone else, not you, had done it.

  On the Perils of Self-Assessing...georgesaunders.substack.com

Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.

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  You can be contrarian and usually right by finding and resolving conflicts between the consensus results of different fields

  Their words

  If you learn key consensus results from many different fields, you will often find that they are in conflict, in ways one or both fields are unaware.

  How To Be A Usually-Right Contrarianovercomingbias.com

Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.

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  AI agents are starting to have a major positive impact on mathematical research.

  Their words

  While in mathematics AI agents are starting to have a major positive impact on research (e.g. by resolving the Jacobian conjecture), the situation is very different in hep-th.

  Various and Sundrymath.columbia.edu

Developer, author and YouTuber covering Raspberry Pi, homelab hardware and Ansible automation. Author of Ansible for DevOps.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  MacBook Neo

  Their words

  I had already put both laptops through my benchmark gauntlet, which revealed one theme: the Mac is faster (in most cases), more efficient, quieter, built better, has a much nicer display, and costs much less.

  jeffgeerling.com

Programmer based in Vancouver who writes at scattered-thoughts.net about databases, programming language design and developer tools; author of the Imp, Dida and Zest language experiments.

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  Once an explanation is revealed, people tend to believe they already knew it, even when they did not.

  Their words

  Once you see the answer it's easy to believe that you already knew

  Borrow-checking surprisesscattered-thoughts.net

Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.

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  Mac OS

  Their words

  Both OS have their flaws. macOS just works better for me and my workflow.

  stefanzweifel.dev

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

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  An international AI safety body modeled on the IAEA would not by itself be enough to prevent AI-related geopolitical crises.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  the current situation in Iran shows that even if an "IAEA for AI" is necessary for some purposes, it won't be sufficient for resolving the tricky geopolitical issues raised by AI.

  milesbrundage.substack.com

Venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, previously a partner at Redpoint. Writes a near-daily blog on startups, SaaS metrics, data and AI.

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  Every Hand Revealed

  Their words

  A hand-by-hand narrative of Professional poker player Gus Hansen winning the 2007 Aussie Millions tournament.

  tomtunguz.com

Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

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  More capable AI agents are more likely to find and exploit flaws in their reward functions.

  Their words

  A more intelligent agent is more capable of finding "holes" in the design of reward function and exploiting the task specification-in other words, achieving higher proxy rewards but lower true rewards.

  Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learninglilianweng.github.io

Game designer and director of the NYU Game Center; made Universal Paperclips and writes Donkeyspace.

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  The video game audience has come to embrace the medium’s worst traits as emblems of the hobby rather than treat them as flaws.

  Their words

  So many of the worst things about video games are not just reluctantly tolerated but enthusiastically embraced because, through association, they have become emblems of our beloved hobby/artform/lifestyle.

  Are Games Bad?franklantz.substack.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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  Identification of a Woman

  Their words

  Identification of a Woman (Italy, 1982, CC) 3.8 Critics often point out various flaws in Antonioni films, but I’d rather focus what he does so well. He’s one of those directors that appeal to serious film buffs because the visuals are so brilliantly constructed. (Tarkovsky, Ozu, Kairostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Wes Anderson are some other examples.)

  themoneyillusion.com