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20 September
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
I think a healthy attitude in life is to look at a rule, assume it was made for a reason, but to always default to getting rid of it (situation might have changed). The German/Austrian mindset however is to defend every rule. As a result, we're accumulating more and more rules. Related
Dumb rules are dumb rules. But what really annoys me about the German speaking world is that the default behavior is to defend every stupid damn rule. Quoting @emrenakyol I thought Germany and German bureaucracy cannot shock me anymore, but it did. I parked my TESLA (!) on an EV-only parking spot in @Konstanz and plugged it into an EV charger. Came back to this fine. Had to use Grok to even understand what was wrong. Turns out you need to have a special EV licence o… Related
17 September
Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.
Kat does not want to look at code after 5. She says that is normal, and it is not a character flaw. Kat Excellence writes at https://t.co/RoNpJ113Fq Full episode: Related
Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.
15 September
Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.
fun fact: in German, writers are usually paid by character not by word, because the word-length distribution has such a long tail Related
12 September
Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.
The German startup Magnotherm is pioneering a new type of cooling technology: Instead of compressing a refrigerant gas, as usual, their fridges use metals that heat up in magnetic fields and cool when the field is removed. This can effectively be used to move the heat from one location (eg inside the fridge) to another (outside the fridge). The idea itself is not new, it goes back to the 19th century, but Magnotherm is the first to make the step to commercial use. Earlier this year, they announced that the German supermarket chain REWE will deploy their new fridges in 10 stores. The company s… startups Related
11 September
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
10 September
Former option trader and risk analyst, now a distinguished professor at NYU. Author of the Incerto essay series, including The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.
It's going to be an interesting screen adaptation. I wonder who wil play the main character. Related
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.
9 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.
Politicians, and people, are often deeply irrational. But it is often easier not to talk about it. In fact, it is considered impolite to talk about it. Case in point. In August 1914, British Columbia premier Sir Richard McBride spent $1.15 million of provincial money on two American submarines. That was about twice the yearly budget of the Royal Canadian Navy. Canadian provinces have no military. The man had no business buying weapons, let alone submarines. Let alone incredibly expensive submarines. A German attack on the West Coast was never likely. Germany did have cruisers in the Pacific f… Quoting @TristinHopper I regularly visit the grave of the B.C. premier who panicked at the outset of the First World War and used taxpayer money to buy a pair of random South American submarines. America Related
7 September
Canadian software developer and writer, co-editor of the XML and Atom specifications and formerly of Sun Microsystems, Google and AWS. Has written the blog ongoing since 2003.
Watching the news out of Germany, feeling a bit baffled. AfD looks like another Trumpy ultranationalist racist-in-practice fashy-adjacent culture-warrior gang, but what I can’t understand is the pro-Russian message: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AfD_pro-Russia_movement Why on earth does that appeal to German voters, even hard-right ones? #afd Russia Related
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.
4 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
It happened again... this time OpenAI's rogue agents cyber-attacked (well, spammed) a dormant German wiki and used it to share the answers to a benchmark they were training against simonwillison.net
OpenAI benchmarks Related
3 September
Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.
2 September
Creative coder behind neal.fun, a site of interactive web experiments including Spend Bill Gates' Money, The Deep Sea and Absurd Trolley Problems.
Made a sketch artist game where you have to draw the character based on witness testimony Related
1 September
Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.
New @Superhuman email logo is so weird. A generic envelope feels out of character for a product that values design so much... Related
31 August
Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.
29 August
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.
startups
Their words
Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.
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@patrickc on X x.com
26 August
Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.
In the long run, the best way to curb cheating isn't proctoring essays and oral exams. It's developing a moral compass. The heart of integrity is recognizing that the ends don’t justify the means. What we achieve defines our success. How we achieve it determines our character. nytimes.com
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25 August
Indian software developer and prolific blogger on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript; open-source enthusiast publishing near-daily at amitmerchant.com.
Added a little more character to my blog's about page. Again. ;) Related
18 August
Indian software developer and prolific blogger on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript; open-source enthusiast publishing near-daily at amitmerchant.com.
You learn about something every day. Yesterday, I learned about something called a "Non-breaking hyphen". Normal hyphen - The browser can usually break the line at this character. Non-breaking hyphen - A hyphen that prevents a line break at the hyphen. Related
16 August
Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.
Their words
Feynman was a Teacher. This book is as fantastic as the man himself.
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rakhim.org
31 July
Polyglot; founded Fluent in 3 Months and argues for speaking from day one rather than waiting until you are ready.
24 July
Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.
22 July
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
self-driving cars China
Their words
The French and Germans will ban Tesla FSD to protect their car industry that's being decimated by Chinese EVs and Tesla Allowing Tesla full self driving would make it so popular that it'd probably the end of their car industry Because no French or German car has self driving like Tesla, many customers would probably flock to Tesla
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levels.io
21 July
Writer of the personal-finance blog Of Dollars And Data and author of Just Keep Buying and The Wealth Ladder. Chief Operating Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management.
Spend enough money and you can convince people you're a wine expert, a German heiress, or a NY Times bestselling author. My latest on the price of status: ofdollarsanddata.com
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15 July
Indonesian software engineer, educator and engineering manager at Zero One Group; open-source enthusiast writing at ripandis.com.
14 July
Programmer and technology writer known for his long Mac OS X reviews at Ars Technica; co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast and Hypercritical.
A few years ago, I commissioned a drawing of my Destiny character from an amazing artist, "EmilyMeganX" on Instagram. She’s currently accepting new commissions. Message her on Instagram if you’re interested: https://www.instagram.com/stories/emilymeganxart/3941019007574408844 You can see my Destiny character picture here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CLAB-iwpPnZ/?igsh=MWRscnpncGVldmpveA== You can even watch a time-lapse of her creating it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu9S-iuiqr4 More videos here: youtube.com
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12 July
Programmer known for LiveJournal, memcached, OpenID and gearman; worked on the Go programming language at Google and later joined Tailscale.
16 June
Editor at Works in Progress writing on architecture, urbanism and housing policy, and a fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies and Create Streets. Has worked in think tanks, academia and government in Britain.
From one piece
Europe's housing shortages are even worse than America's
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Europe
Their words
In fact, zoning was invented in Europe, in Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the late nineteenth century.
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worksinprogress.news
Europe
Their words
I suspect the same is often true in the rest of Europe: NIMBYism is the ultimate reason why the French and German states don’t solve their housing shortages through unbanning densification, but since the claims of the NIMBYs have been preemptively conceded by everyone, NIMBYism has basically remained latent.
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worksinprogress.news
20 May
Writer on happiness, habits and human nature. Author of The Happiness Project, Better Than Before and The Four Tendencies, and host of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast.
How to Design Your Summer Have you ever felt, toward the end of a summer, that you wished you’d done more with the season? The writer Robertson Davies, put it well: “Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless…
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29 April
Marriage and family therapist working from attachment theory and emotionally focused therapy. Author of Secure Love and the person behind The Secure Relationship.
18 March
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.
15 March
American front-end engineer and design-systems specialist; built the Pantsuit design system for Hillary for America and has worked at Slack and IBM.
Better Call Saul. We knew the fates of almost every character from the beginning and yet it still managed to surprise and delight. Quoting @blackazizanansi.blacksky.app Which show do you prefer? Related
7 March
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
On the last leg of my journey home from Laracon EU. Swishing with a train through the south German countryside. Sun slowly setting. World of Warcraft's Westfall theme in my ears. Perfection. Related
1 March
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
RE: https://phpc.social/@stefanzweifel/116149086800020733 Our group has been hit by the DeutscheBahn curse: Were stuck at a German operated train station for 2 hours. Let's see if we arrive in the evening. Related
18 January
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
Might be a long shot: Selling my collection of Offscreen Magazine Issues (№ 11-24). They are all in great condition. I'm happy to sell the complete set or single issues if you're interested in specific ones. More details on this selling site in German: https://www.ricardo.ch/de/a/offscreen-magazine-%E2%80%93-ausgaben-nr-11%E2%80%9324-(print-englisch)-1307183180/ Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! (Shipping only in Europe) #OffscreenMagazine #ForSale Europe Related
1 January
Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.
Their words
Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall is short and engrossing. It was deemed a “Cold War” novel by the German press when it was published in 1963.
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danwang.co
21 December 2025
Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.
Their words
However, the book gave the main character far more depth than the movie.
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awealthofcommonsense.com
19 December 2025
Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.
A Look at My Fountain Pens The first time I used a fountain pen was in Grundschule, the German primary school system. I believe I was 7 or 8 years old, though it might have been a few years later. Back then my father bought me a Lamy Safari, and…
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11 December 2025
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.
What do you call it when someone writes a dramatization of the trials and tribulations of a bold emacs session heroically handling a keypress which results in writing a single character into the current buffer? `self-insert-command` fanfiction Related
9 December 2025
Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.
Their words
PanOxyl pimple patches. These are not as fun as Starface/my cute anime character patches but ridiculously better than any other ones on the market.
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avabear.xyz
1 December 2025
American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.
Their words
K-Pop Demon Hunters functions fabulously as an action-oriented animated musical, but what makes it rewatchable are the character interactions.
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whatever.scalzi.com
28 November 2025
President of the United States, the 45th from 2017 to 2021 and, as of 2026, the 47th; before politics a New York property developer who ran the Trump Organization, and the host of The Apprentice from 2004 to 2015.
The United States did not attend the G20 in South Africa, because the South African Government refuses to acknowledge or address the horrific Human Right Abuses endured by Afrikaners, and other descendants of Dutch, French, and German settlers. To put it more bluntly, they are killing white people, and randomly allowing their farms to be taken from them. Perhaps, worst of all, the soon to be out of business New York Times and the Fake News Media won’t issue a word against this genocide. That’s why all the Liars and Pretenders of the Radical Left Media are going out of business! At the conclus… America government Related
31 October 2025
Co-founder of Rockstar Games, lead writer of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, and founder of Absurd Ventures since leaving in 2020.
Their words
And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally, it doesn’t really matter what’s going on in their head; they haven’t actually got one, but what they say is what’s going to make you realize who they are.
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youtube.com
10 October 2025
Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.
Germany has agreed to stop ChatControl for now, due to huge amounts of public pressure. Good job! The bad news is that it could come back as soon as December, and the German government has interpreted the feedback as a need to “moderate” the proposal. government Related
19 September 2025
German writer and historian; wrote Blitzed, on drug use in Nazi Germany, and Tripped.
From one piece
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481
5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
And the German war machine could only win in so-called speed wars, like lightning war. Only if they would do it very fast and surprise, because they were always weaker, basically.
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youtube.com
Their words
So the Navy hired the shoe runners unit from the SS, paid them money, and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and chewing gum and all kinds of things. So this is a big thing, you know. And there are documents to it.
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youtube.com
Russia
Their words
So Hitler receives this Dolantin injection, and he gets up, he goes into the meeting room, he dominates the meeting room, he feels great. He decides, you know, in front of everybody, no one is able to… no one overpowers him in that meeting. He was very good in the room. And the troops are split up. Like Leningrad is now a target. This weakens the general thrust towards Moscow. This is probably why they didn't take Moscow.
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youtube.com
+ 2 more
Their words
And he said this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler's degeneration as a leader. He made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war, and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you can link that to drugs.
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youtube.com
Russia
Their words
And that was not the British soldier, not the French soldier, not the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer.
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youtube.com
16 July 2025
Chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, which he has led since 2005 after turning around Bank One.
Their words
You know, in the banking business, the character the clients you have will reflect in your bank. So, the first thing is who you're doing business with, how you're doing business
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youtube.com
24 May 2025
Historian of the Second World War; wrote Normandy '44 and Brothers in Arms, and co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast.
From one piece
James Holland: World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin & Biggest Battles | Lex Fridman Podcast #470
5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
I mean, it is largely down to incompetence of the Red Army and the Soviet leadership in the summer of 1941 that they get as far as they do. I mean, Barbarossa should never have come close to being a victory.
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youtube.com
Their words
He might have amazing attention to detail, he might be able to understand, have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the First World war. He’s never been to staff college.
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youtube.com
America
Their words
And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.
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youtube.com
+ 2 more
Their words
I mean, the reason why France is subdued in 1940 is 50% brilliance of the Germans and their operational art in that particular instance, and 50% French failure really, and incompetence.
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youtube.com
Russia
Their words
And Russians will hate me for saying this, and I probably will get a whole load of bots on the back of it, but the truth is, it is not the street fighting that destroys Sixth Army, it is the encirclement, the subsequent encirclement.
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youtube.com
22 March 2025
Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.
Their words
The editor obviously does not make the programmer, but I think it says a lot about your character as a programmer if you don't know how to use your editor well.
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youtube.com
13 January 2025
Runs global health R&D at Open Philanthropy; writes about the science and medicine that could exist and does not.
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
Excellent character-study/drama about the price of fame, the sincerest forms of flattery, and a little meta-fictionally, the psychology of the theatre and Broadway being usurped by Hollywood
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gwern.net
4 June 2024
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
17 April 2024
Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."
28 September 2023
Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company he started as Facebook in 2004.
Their words
So that's a lot of what I think we need to nail for the creators, and that's why that one is actually a much harder problem, I think, than starting with new characters that you're creating from scratch.
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youtube.com
11 August 2023
Family therapist and founder of Relational Life Therapy. Author of I Don't Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through to You? and Us; argues that Western individualism is what makes couples' work hard.
14 April 2021
Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
It's time to say goodbye to the GPL The trigger for this post is the reinstating of Richard Stallman, a very problematic character, to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). I am appalled by this move, and join others in the call for his removal…
Related
30 January 2020
British senior engineering manager at Netlify, previously a team lead at the BBC; writes about JavaScript testing, chatbots and serverless at marclittlemore.com.
Their words
I use the mono-spaced Fira Code font for development work but I don't enable the ligatures. I still like two symbols rather than a single character for code like!= and =>.
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marclittlemore.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've owned them for like 12 years and they show zero signs of wear. German engineering man, gotta love it.
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adamwathan.me
2 December 2015
Co-creator of the Go programming language, of UTF-8 and of the Plan 9 operating system; formerly of Bell Labs.
11 March 2015
Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.
11 May 2012
Economist; Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and co-author of 13 Bankers and Power and Progress.
Their words
This is one of the great political biographies. Teddy Roosevelt was like a character out of a novel, so it's not surprising that his biography reads like one.
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fivebooks.com
17 April 2009
Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.
Nothing matches. Show everything
What is a korrent?
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