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20 September
Standards editor known as Hixie; edited the HTML and WHATWG living standards for many years and worked on Flutter at Google.
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
A lot of our discussions about merit, talent, and ability are going to look pretty silly in a decade or two Related
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
A way generation discourse is perpetually silly is culture of a new generation is always shaped by the older generation since they're the adults making most of the culture. Like popular "millennial" bands were composed of gen x musicians, whose bands were full of boomers, etc. Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds got really stupid this season. It's like the creators decided that the basic Star Trek premise is totally played out, and just decided to do silly fun stuff with their remaining budget. Related
19 September
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
"The groups best known for a Harry Potter fan fic and boosting the profile of crypto scammer SBF might be a bunch of silly losers? You're telling me this for the first time." Quoting @jessesingal we've reached the phase where a bunch of people have learned about EA or rationalism for the first time, have decided it's insanely weird and cultish, and are now reverse-engineering reasons to hold this belief crypto Related
16 September
Sociologist at Duke University writing on markets, exchange and moral order, and on plain-text and data-visualisation tools for social science.
On Golden Gate, you can chat to the built-in foundation model directly with `fm chat`. You can also do things like pipeline it into scripts. E.g., in the second screenshot here it's reading and summarizing a @sixcolors article. The model's context window is quite small, so I had to write a script that chunked the text, so it's sort of serially summarized. Still, it’s nice to have fully-local access to this model in this way. Related
15 September
Artist and developer who makes esoteric software, games and tools aboard a sailboat as part of Hundred Rabbits with Rekka Bellum; creator of the Uxn virtual machine and the Orca livecoding environment.
I've been scratching my head trying to think how to package assets for my #lispGameJam project, I really REALLY wanted to be able to inline assets as raw hex code, like I normally do for uxn projects, not have to read binary files, so I added a special form with square brackets that lets me to just that! This is the first sprite(a little arrow) I was able to store in my source code. Related
Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.
14 September
Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.
New week new demo! Today I want to showcase the CLI to control the @superlogical multiplexer. The CLI is an extremely powerful tool for automation and hooking into other tools like editors, agentic coding tools, and more. And, it's super fun! Everything you can do in the GUI, you can do via the CLI. Actually, you can do more in the CLI. You can create sessions, run commands, make splits, move things around, change focus, simulate any input device (key/mouse/etc.), wait on scripts, and more. There are a couple unique parts of Rex I'm showing off here too: our streaming event system that any cl… Related
Web infrastructure engineer and standards editor; chaired the IETF HTTP working group and co-authored core HTTP and Atom specifications.
12 September
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
11 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.
2 September
Canadian full-stack web developer who makes JavaScript and CSS video courses and co-hosts the Syntax podcast.
I am begging you to stop using AI to write your video scripts. Shortform content is becoming unwatchable and that's not even the crazy part Related
1 September
Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.
Their words
and they're creatively pursuing goals much like very ambitious aggressive power-seeking humans creatively pursued their goals And so there are just structural analogies here that make it silly to not talk about agents as having motives and goals.
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28 August
Creator of Homebrew, the macOS package manager, and a Swift developer.
Automic Vault means your CLI tools don’t perform sensitive actions without your approval. This applies to agents and supply chain attacks both. We patch tools at the *packaging layer*. Blessed Scripts allow you to make small, vetted scripts that escalate tool capabilities. Reentrant Blessed Scripts are a scripting pattern that allow you to “weave” in agent capabilities. Interleaving deterministic work with escalated Tool capabilities and secrets with applied intelligence. Perfect for automations. Quoting @AutomicVault We have documented the concept of `Reentrant Blessed Scripts` that describe our suggested mechanism of giving Agent Automations a set of escalated capabilities and secrets. Have the automation execute a Blessed Script with Automic Vault front-matter for the capabilities and… Related
26 August
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.
You probably feel guilty or stressed whenever you experience intense frustration or anxiety while working on a tough project. But cognitive scientists found that deep worry is actually a powerful tool that forces your brain to see hidden solutions you normally miss. You can turn your worst stress into a breakthrough using the Creative Desperation framework. Here is the exact method: 🧵 Related
17 August
Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.
Their words
So rather than thinking of death as we normally do as the world loses you, the neuroscience perspective is the inverse which is you lose the world.
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6 August
Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.
17 July
Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.
13 July
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.
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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25 June
Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.
22 June
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
5 June
Canadian full-stack web developer who makes JavaScript and CSS video courses and co-hosts the Syntax podcast.
Bose QC35s are still going after 10 years. I change the headphone pads every year or so and they feel like new I fear I may have gone a bit too silly with these ones.. Related
3 June
Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.
Their words
The thing that makes Kubernetes powerful, there's a data model. We gave infrastructure a type system. So instead of imperative shell scripts, you finally had types.
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25 May
Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.
I still meet people convinced that AI coding tools will soon reach a point where code quality, design, and even architecture are "solved". So I ran a small ad-hoc experiment. I’ve been working on a CLI tool and let agents plan and implement a first functionally correct version. I provided strict instructions around testing strategy, workflows, and implementation constraints. But I deliberately removed the @codescene MCP and the safeguards I normally rely on. Unsurprisingly, the resulting code suffered from a ton of problems. It would have been a shaky foundation to continue building on. How s… MCP Related
14 May
Technology journalist; writes Understanding AI, after reporting at Ars Technica, Vox and the Washington Post.
13 May
Software engineer and educator; creator of Testing Library and of the EpicWeb.dev and EpicReact.dev courses.
30 April
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
Fireside chat at Sequoia Ascent 2026 from a ~week ago. Some highlights: The first theme I tried to push on is that LLMs are about a lot more than just speeding up what existed before (e.g. coding). Three examples of new horizons: 1. menugen: an app that can be fully engulfed by LLMs, with no classical code needed: input an image, output an image and an LLM can natively do the thing. 2. install .md skills instead of install .sh scripts. Why create a complex Software 1.0 bash script for e.g. installing a piece of software if you can write the installation out in words and say "just show this to… Quoting @stephzhan @karpathy and I are back! At @sequoia AI Ascent 2026. And a lot has changed. Last year, he coined “vibe coding”. This year, he’s never felt more behind as a programmer. The big shift: vibe coding raised the floor. Agentic engineering raises the ceiling. We talk about what it means to build seriousl… LLMs Related
17 April
Release engineering manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. Keeps a public log at tylercipriani.com of every book he reads, with a rating and notes.
Today's bash adventure, I never reach echo in this script: set -e (( X++ )) echo "X=$X" Why? Because (( X++ )) returns 0. And returning 0 from (( is a NON-zero exit code—an error. Because of course, how silly of me. Related
10 April
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
- Here is a photo of my family. I love them more than anything. Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person fr…
Related
12 March
JavaScript programmer; creator of the jQuery library, author of Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, and long-time engineer at Khan Academy.
I have a private db of Japanese print sales and I used @claudeai to make a report analyzing this month's auctions: https://t.co/uwMCtbjQ17 identifying under-valued lots, rare prints, comparing prints across auctions. Normally VERY hard to get this guidance. Related
11 March
Standards editor known as Hixie; edited the HTML and WHATWG living standards for many years and worked on Flutter at Google.
23 February
Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.
Some Silly Z3 Scripts I Wrote As part of writing Logic for Programmers I produced a lot of “chaff”, code samples and sections I wrote up and then threw away. Sometimes I found a better example for the same topic, sometimes I threw the to…
Related
19 February
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
12 February
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
Their words
Some other comparison is like, Opus is like the coworker that is a little silly sometimes, but it's really funny and you keep him around. And Codex is like the, the weirdo in the corner that you don't wanna talk to, but is reliable and gets shit done.
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28 September 2025
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.
27 August 2025
Full-stack Laravel developer based in Madison, Wisconsin; maintains open-source Laravel, Livewire and Alpine.js packages and writes at randallwilk.dev.
11 August 2025
Co-founder of Modem and a founding engineer at Sentry, where he went on to be VP of Engineering. Co-author of Third-party JavaScript, and co-host of the State of Agentic Coding podcast with Armin Ronacher.
18 May 2025
Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.
31 March 2025
Energy and decarbonisation analyst; publishes an annual chart deck on the state of the transition, and was chief content officer at BloombergNEF.
21 March 2025
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
Their words
A more how-to pragmatic version of carving your own path. Includes some personal story of reinvention but more on experimentation that challenges our default scripts of success and ambition.
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pathlesspath.com
5 March 2025
Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.
March 2025 Well, I've had a dramatic start to the year. Normally, the design agency I joined a short eight months ago, unexpectedly closed down in January. Despite running for a decade and working with almost every major tech comp…
Related
1 February 2025
American front-end engineer and design-systems specialist; built the Pantsuit design system for Hillary for America and has worked at Slack and IBM.
26 December 2024
Game developer, formerly at Looking Glass Studios, and author of the stb single-file public-domain C libraries used across the games industry.
19 December 2024
Swedish open source developer; creator and lead maintainer of curl and libcurl, and a co-founder of the Rockbox project.
3 December 2024
French software engineer, public speaker and fully remote nomadic worker; writes about frontend development at maxpou.fr.
I wrote a post about a type of hack that I had never seen before. Tomas Robert, a YouTuber with decent metrics (162k subscribers/650k total views) turned out to be an AI-generated person designed to trick viewers into executing malicious scripts and stealing cryptos maxpou.fr
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15 July 2024
Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.
29 June 2024
Gwern Recommends
29 Jun 2024
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.
Their words
It is excellent to watch on a big screen in 3D despite how silly it ultimately is, so I’m not surprised it’s been successful.
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gwern.net
17 June 2024
Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.
3 January 2024
Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.
30 August 2023
Developer and designer publishing at pouria.dev; author of the open-source URL shortener Kutt.
Their words
Alfred 4, launcher, clipboard manager, scripts and more.
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pouria.dev
21 August 2023
Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.
29 June 2023
Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.
Their words
So it struck me one day how just silly atheism is. Of course, we were created by God. It’s the most obvious thing.
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17 June 2023
Writer and consultant on technology, organizations and history; founded the blog Ribbonfarm and now writes the Contraptions newsletter.
Their words
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
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contraptions.venkateshrao.com
Their words
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
Show the whole quote
contraptions.venkateshrao.com
Their words
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
Show the whole quote
contraptions.venkateshrao.com
24 December 2019
Creative coder behind neal.fun, a site of interactive web experiments including Spend Bill Gates' Money, The Deep Sea and Absurd Trolley Problems.
Their words
To record my silly Twitter videos I use Bandicam and GifCam.
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usesthis.com
16 September 2019
Mathematical biologist; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death and How to Expect the Unexpected.
Their words
Matt is a stand-up comedian and he's a very funny guy. He makes mathematics interesting by making it funny. In this book, he pokes fun at people who've made silly mathematical mistakes, but at the same time he also looks at some issues that are quite serious: bridges collapsing and killing people, for example. He can do the somber, serious stuff as well. It's a great book. As far as I know, it's the first math book that's ever been a number one bestseller.
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fivebooks.com
20 August 2019
Full-stack developer, creator of Tailwind CSS; writes at adamwathan.me and makes courses and screencasts for web developers.
Their words
I use Todoist to keep track of my todos. I really like the scheduled and recurring tasks features, lets me use Todoist for a lot of stuff that you might normally put in a calendar.
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adamwathan.me
4 November 2014
CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.
5 January 2014
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.
5 September 2013
Mac and iOS developer; founder of Red Sweater Software (MarsEdit, FastScripts) and co-host of the Core Intuition podcast.
Their words
I mentioned FastScripts for running quick scripts, but I also use TextExpander extensively, particularly for accelerating responses to customer support email.
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usesthis.com
24 October 2011
Media theorist and writer; author of Program or Be Programmed and Team Human, and host of the Team Human podcast.
Their words
I write my books and comics scripts in Scrivener. Articles happen in Word, but I'm leaving it behind more and more, and just writing in Textedit to save myself all the time and energy associated with Microsoft.
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usesthis.com
17 May 2010
Writer and web developer; founding editor of Lifehacker, co-creator of ThinkUp and of the todo.txt format.
Nothing matches. Show everything
What is a korrent?
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.
Got it