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Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.

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  Reclassifying a vaccine out of official routine-recommendation status erodes practical access to it even without changing the recommendation itself.

  Their words

  Moving a vaccine out of that category adds significant implementation barriers that will erode access to vaccines.

  yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter on the business and strategy of technology, and hosts the Dithering and Sharp Tech podcasts.

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  A proposal to pace frontier AI development is unrealistic and mainly serves political control of AI.

  Their words

  Dario Amodei wants to pace the frontier; it's an unrealistic proposal that seems mostly geared to political control of AI.

  2026.38: Doomforcestratechery.com

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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  AI policy discussions should start with China rather than treating it as an afterthought.

  China

  Their words

  Whatever your ideas for regulating AI, I say start with China. Do not put China as an afterthought at the end of your proposal, mentioned in a vague wish that something good ought to happen and that maybe the future of humanity can be secured.

  When discussing AI policy, start with Chinamarginalrevolution.com

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  Mass AI-written outreach fails on its own terms: playing the same numbers game as everyone else adds to the noise you then drown in.

  Their words

  Don't expect a response to an AI-written email, or a templated email. I get it, you think it's a numbers game: send a tweaked email out to 100 podcasts, and hope that at least one replies. In reality, by playing the same game as everyone else does, you are assisting to the noise, and end up drowning yourself in it as well.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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

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  One reliable tell of AI writing is excessively colorful verbs where a normal person would use a plain one.

  Their words

  I was thinking about how I recognize AI writing, and one big tell is excessively colorful verbs. A handful of journalists might write that a proposal "drew" 100 votes, but any normal person will just say "got".

  @paulg on Xx.com

Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.

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  Metformin is not a general-purpose anti-cancer or anti-ageing drug, and healthy people should not take it as one.

  Their words

  MAST adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that metformin is not a general-purpose anticancer drug.

  Metformin and cancer: active surveillance neededpeterattiamd.com

Independent iOS developer and podcaster; co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast and Analog(ue), and makes the apps Callsheet, MaskerAid and Peek-a-View.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  CalDigit TS5+

  Their words

  I had a TS4 before it, and the TS5+ adds 10Gb ethernet, which is amazing when moving files on/off my network-attached storage.

  usesthis.com

Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.

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  Answering every problem, competitor and user request with one more shipped feature does not add up to a good product; it adds up to a horrible one.

  Their words

  If you add that up, you think, "Oh, we shipped a thousand features. Now that adds it to a good product." It actually adds it to a horrible product.

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

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  A design proposal should describe the feature as though it already existed — once as a tutorial and once as reference documentation.

  documentation

  Their words

  And what this is is that in the guide level explanation, you explain your feature as if you were writing a guide as if the feature already existed. And in the reference level explanation, you explain your feature again as if it already existed, but as if it would be in the language reference instead of a tutorial.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.

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  Exceptions are an inherently poor way of handling errors because they make bugs harder to spot on casual code inspection.

  Their words

  exceptions are an inherently poor way of handling errors because they make it easier to write bugs which won't be immediately obvious on casual code inspection

  20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Jobdaemonology.net

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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  When an AI writes bad code the thing to fix is the context it was given, not the code, because fixing the output adds no leverage.

  Their words

  if it produces incorrect code our philosophy is don't fix the code fix the context that cursor had that produced the bad code

  youtube.com

Energy and decarbonisation analyst; publishes an annual chart deck on the state of the transition, and was chief content officer at BloombergNEF.

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  Solar power now adds more new capacity to the global grid each year than any technology ever has, and will soon lead in annual electricity added too.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.

  Traveler’s Talesnathanielbullard.com

Alignment researcher at Anthropic; co-led OpenAI's superalignment team until 2024, and writes Musings on the Alignment Problem.

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  We cannot know how much safety a control measure buys until we understand elicitation, so control adds a margin of unknown size.

  Their words

  However, without having a good handle on elicitation, we cannot be confident that our control techniques are effective.

  Should we control AI instead of aligning it?aligned.substack.com

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

From one piece Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Every SETI search ever conducted adds up to sampling a hot tub's worth of an ocean, so finding nothing tells us nothing.

  Their words

  And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it

  youtube.com

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  Every faster-than-light proposal depends on exotic matter, which does not exist and was invented to make the equations behave.

  Their words

  But here's the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something. The thing you added, the little fictional term you added into the equations is something called exotic matter and it doesn't exist. It's really just something we dreamed up to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do.

  youtube.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

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  Cooling adds nothing to what a data centre produces, which is why it is the first thing a good design deletes rather than optimises.

  data centersenergy

  Their words

  The cooling systems in most data centers are energy hogs and contribute no direct value.

  How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site

Software engineer writing about maintenance, open source and the industrial reality of software — the author of "I am not a supplier".

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  Most of the code the world runs on is maintained by hobbyists with an hour or two a month, so any proposal that needs more than that will simply be ignored.

  Their words

  It means that anything you offer must fit in 1h per month. That is it. And if it does not, if it needs more involvement than that, we, as maintainers, will not do it. At all.

  softwaremaxims.com

Environmental researcher; writes on land use, agriculture and whether decoupling human welfare from nature is possible.

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  Making American farms more productive shrinks cropland in the rest of the world by more than it adds at home.

  America

  Their words

  Nelson Villoria estimates that for every 1% gain in Total Factor Productivity (inputs required per unit of output) in the US, croplands in the rest of the world shrink by 0.7%.

  Raising Agricultural Yields Spares Landthebreakthrough.org

Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  James

  Their words

  Briefly, James is Huckleberry Finn retold from the perspective of Jim. It has all the energy and humor of Twain's work—in Everett's own unique voice of course—and adds a whole new level of depth to the story.

  countercraft.substack.com

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

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  About a dozen holdings captures nearly all the benefit of diversification; going to fifty adds almost nothing.

  Their words

  I even recommend for individual investors to invest in a dozen companies, you don't get that much more benefit of diversification going from a dozen to 25 or even 50.

  youtube.com

Founder of Amazon in 1994 and of the space company Blue Origin in 2000.

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  Building a factory that turns out rockets at rate is at least as hard as designing the rocket in the first place.

  Their words

  So you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate. And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the first place

  youtube.com

Programmer and entrepreneur; co-founded GitHub and created Jekyll, Gravatar and the Semantic Versioning spec.

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  Building a secure, performant GraphQL API is tricky and adds real cost during early-stage app prototyping.

  Their words

  While we love GraphQL for many use cases, implementing a secure and performant GraphQL API can be tricky and there is a definite cost to requiring it during early prototyping of your app.

  tom.preston-werner.com

Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Funding should pay for maintenance, not features, because every new feature adds to the burden the money was meant to relieve.

  Their words

  Finally, the health of the project depends on issue triage, bug fixes, refactors, and design work more than on new features. In fact, new features increase the maintenance burden.

  How to pay professional maintainerswords.filippo.io

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every mile of public-road testing adds risk, so each one has to earn its keep.

  Their words

  Even if you have the best possible safety drivers, every test mile adds some risk. Hopefully that risk is no worse than human driver vehicle risks, but that’s a different discussion.

  safeautonomy.blogspot.com

Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.

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  Building automation that doesn't address the actual bottleneck to shipping adds noise rather than helping ship.

  Their words

  If what's holding you back from shipping is, say, getting more customer input, or a brittle release process, or flaky monitoring, or missing tests, then all the bot does is to add noise. It doesn't help you ship.

  But does it help you ship?thorstenball.com