Related posts

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI tools have not made shipping speed a solved problem, because shipping speed was never only the rate of production — you have to think of the ideas first.

  startups

  Their words

  there's still a lot of startups in this batch that are not shipping fast enough. And so obviously there's variation in shipping speed. It's not just the rate at which you can produce things. You have to think of these ideas first, right?

  youtube.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ruling out every measurable cause because none explains all the variation, and putting an unmeasured one in their place, is not an explanation.

  Their words

  He ruled out all the actual, measurable variables because they were an imperfect explanation, and instead offers a vague, diffuse variable, for which he has no measure, and which is not actually included in his model.

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The skill that matters now is not prompt engineering but giving a model a way to verify its own work, and it is the thing people most often get wrong.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  I think the skill nowadays is less about prompt engineering and more about figuring out how do you give Claude a hard task that seems a little bit too hard. And then how do you make it possible for Claude to verify its work along the way? And the verification I think is probably the single most important thing that people do not get right

  Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code's Promptyoutube.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

  Every lab knows the benchmark grid is the wrong way to present a model, and publishes it anyway because everybody else does.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  And so you kind of end up in this this bad equilibrium where everybody kind of knows that it's a bad equilibrium, but like nobody wants to break out. And I I felt like, okay, well, if I just hopefully come out and say like, look guys, let's all recognize that we're in a bad equilibrium and let's move to this different equilibrium where we're we're plotting things with an X-axis

  youtube.com

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  For any trait built out of many mutations, all the variation needed to move a population to a new adaptive set point already exists inside it.

  Their words

  So for complex traits, ones underpinned by many mutations, all the variation already exists to move the population to a different adaptive set point that's optimal in the environment which it's in.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, which he started in 2011 while studying product design at Stanford.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Distribution, not product-market fit, is the hard part of consumer technology, and almost nobody spends enough time on it.

  Their words

  And I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about, you know, distribution and figuring out distribution. And that seems to me uh to be a huge differentiator.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Writing is how the thinking gets done, so a writer who hands the words to a machine has given away the part that mattered.

  Their words

  It's more that for myself, the process of writing is the way how I figure things out. And figuring things out is really my goal here. So, I'm I'm trying to figure it out in my own heads, and for that I just have to write it myself.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Release management is human group sense-making, and it does not scale to the volume of change AI now produces.

  Their words

  so many times that process has been managed by humans because you're selecting the right candidate build and you're verifying it and you're thinking, you know, you're figuring out cherry picks and then you like rebundle and then you send it out and that doesn't scale if you have one or two or a handful of people trying to make group decisions and do group sense making.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Getting a data centre permitted in the empty middle of America is far easier than putting one in orbit.

  data centersAmerica

  Their words

  And so I think people are figuring out how to build these things and permitting like I I just like ultimately like permitting and red tape in middle of nowhere Texas or middle of nowhere Wyoming or middle of nowhere like New Mexico is probably a hell of a lot easier than sending stuff into space

  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

  Schools account for a tenth or less of the variation in how well students do.

  Their words

  That makes perfect sense when you consider that schools control 10% or less of the variance in student academic outputs.

  There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Large language models mimic what people say to do rather than work out what to do, which is why they are not about understanding the world.

  LLMs

  Their words

  reinforcement learning is about understanding your world whereas large language models are about mimicking people doing what people say you should do. They're not about figuring out what to do.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A stated company value that nobody would take the other side of is a platitude, not a choice.

  Their words

  figuring out a document that is actually like sort of all the things that are not platitudes whereas like all the things where someone else like some other company would plausibly take the other side of and but that's but those are the real choices, right? Like if no one would take the other side, it's a platitude.

  youtube.com

Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A speed difference between languages that share the LLVM backend measures the benchmark author, not the languages.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  It's just that Zig, C, C++, all those languages that were being tested, they're all LLVM backends, right? That's the one that actually turns the thing into the executable part. And if there's a variation in speed, it just means in one language you didn't quite express what you are supposed to correctly.

  youtube.com

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.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties

  Their words

  Fantastic memoir of figuring it out in your twenties and alternatives to blindly pursuing the default path.

  pathlesspath.com

Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Any theory of the fall in birth rates must explain both the worldwide collapse and the differences between countries, and most theories explain only one.

  Their words

  It must explain both the global collapse and local variation.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Someone who can't name what they'd do differently is unlikely to be good at improving over time.

  Their words

  if the person responds to "what would you do differently" with "nothing," or with non-actionable vague platitudes, it's a sign they may not be great at figuring out how to get better at things over time.

  How I build and run behavioral interviewsbenkuhn.net

Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Judging how wide a company's moat is is the hardest thing an investor does, and this is the most disruptable period in history.

  Their words

  The most difficult analysis to do as an investor is that, is kind of figuring out how wide is the moat, how much at risk is the business to disruption? And we're in, I would say, the greatest period of disruptability in history.

  youtube.com

Writes Nintil, long researched essays on metascience, biology, economics and whatever he has decided to read the literature on.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Pre-grant peer review predicts which research will have impact substantially better than chance does.

  Their words

  I have reviewed before the effectiveness of peer review at figuring out "what's good" in the context of grant awards, finding that peer review as currently practiced does substantially better than chance at predicting future impact, especially for the most impactful of the papers; but at the same time is is far from perfect, leaving plenty of variance unexplained.

  nintil.com