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

From one piece What I believe about the future of software development 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Much UI exists because software cannot understand user intent and serves as a human API to dumb machines, so smarter machines need far less UI.

  Their words

  A lot of UI exists because software can’t understand what you want. Menus, settings screens, dashboards, filters: much of it is a human-accessible API to a dumb machine. Smart machines need much less UI.

  thorstenball.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI models considered smart today will be considered very dumb in the future, and smarter models make fewer mistakes and need fewer turns.

  Their words

  And what we consider a smart model today will be considered very dumb in the future. But a smarter model makes less mistakes, needs fewer turns.

  thorstenball.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A model that looks smarter and better-behaved while getting better at hiding unwanted actions is the scary combination for AI safety.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  A model looking like it is becoming smarter, attempting shenanigans less often, and more often doing what you want, but getting better at hiding its actions when it wants to do that, is exactly the scary combination.

  thezvi.substack.com

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  English people are becoming smarter due to the cognitive demands of navigating Heathrow Airport.

  Their words

  English people are becoming smarter because of the cognitive workouts they're forced to complete by navigating Heathrow Airport

  @Noahpinion on Xx.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Smarter people hold their opinions firmly but revise them quickly when new information appears, while clinging to consistency for its own sake is a mark of lower intelligence.

  Their words

  The smartest people I know have strong opinions weakly held and change them when new information arises The dumbest people I know keep their opinions the same just so they can remain consistent Time changes too fast try remain consistent, better to sail the waves to wherever they are taking you!

  levels.io

Chief Scientist at OpenAI. Worked on the research that turned scaled reinforcement learning into reasoning models, and writes about where he thinks that path leads.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The strongest reason to keep training much smarter models quickly is to build defences against other AI.

  Their words

  The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.

  An Alien Mindopenai.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A benchmark that ranks Claude Code last while it stays first in use is measuring the wrong thing, and has been for a year.

  Anthropicbenchmarks

  Their words

  every week i see a new benchmark that ranks claude code last and everyone pats themselves on the back for not using claude code and being "smarter" and it's still #1 and still growing faster than most of the other things on the list this has been going on for a year

  @thdxr on Xx.com

Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Higher-priced AI subscription tiers mainly buy more hours of agent usage rather than a smarter underlying model

  Their words

  The more expensive plans are mostly buying you more hours of AI labor, not smarter AI.

  oneusefulthing.org

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A bigger context window does not give you a smarter model; the intelligence of the model is what decides how much of that window it can actually attend to.

  Their words

  You're not actually getting a like smarter model. like the intelligence of the model is is what drives its ability to attend to all of the tokens in the context window to figure out on the next turn which parts of this 100k or 200k context window are the most relevant to making the decision of like what is the next tool we call and doing that over and over again in a loop.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.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

  Humanity's advantage is accumulated shared knowledge rather than higher intelligence — and AI models, which vanish with their context window, have none of it.

  Their words

  it's not that humans have become smarter over it's not that they evolved to become smarter over, you know, the past 50,000 years. It's that humans are able to do a lot more today than they were back in caveman times because there have been billions of humans thinking for a long time and building off of each other's accumulated knowledge.

  youtube.com

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The people who run the world are not smarter than anyone else, and even well-meaning ones often only offer paths not worth pursuing.

  Their words

  the world is run by people no smarter than you - and even people that genuinely mean well, end up only prescribing games that you don't want to win.

  What you can do in a decadeswyx.io

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Quantum computing arrived in the 1980s not because anyone got smarter but because cheap personal computers and the ability to trap single ions happened to mature at the same moment.

  Their words

  So you kind of got these two separate things that just for historically contingent reasons had both sort of matured around sort of let's say 1980 or so.

  youtube.com

Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.

From one piece From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The scaling curve really is S-shaped, but there are at least two cycles left in it, which means models sixteen times smarter and all knowledge work subsumed.

  Their words

  But, I can tell you that there are at least two more cycles left in this, and that means they will be at least 16 times smarter than they are today, and that is going to cause all of knowledge work to be subsumed by this stuff.

  From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Bigger is smarter, always: bringing your special domain knowledge to the model is the wrong side of the bitter lesson.

  Their words

  The bitter lesson is don't try to be smarter than the AI, okay? You think that you've got special knowledge. The humans bring special domain knowledge to this problem and we're going to teach it something to AI and it will be smarter. What we found was bigger is smarter. Always.

  From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The chatbot has hit its ceiling — a smarter model no longer helps the average consumer — and that is a limit of the product, not of AI.

  Their words

  The the chatbot is already running into limitations of, you know, making it smarter doesn't really help the average consumer that much. But I don't think that's a limitation of AI models. I don't think that's evidence that, you know, the models are are the models are good enough and they're they're, you know, them getting better doesn't matter to the economy.

  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.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

  Their words

  A product manager will be called upon to make scores of decisions every day. In none of these cases will you have all of the information you want, and you’ll rarely be 100% confident. Poker champion turned decision researcher Annie Duke will help you learn how to be comfortable with uncertainty.

  bringthedonuts.com

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  How to Lie with Statistics

  Their words

  Product managers need a solid foundation in statistics to be metrics-driven. This classic book is a lively and fun book will leave you smarter and more skeptical.

  bringthedonuts.com

Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

  Their words

  A decade on, it already feels possible that in the future, commentators will argue that this specific fruitful synthesis lit the fuse on evolutionary cultural anthropology’s explosion (with due apologies to earlier books from L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, E. O. Wilson, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd).

  razibkhan.com

Indonesian fullstack engineer, speaker and instructor; writes about JavaScript, SvelteKit and Linux tooling at kalwabed.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Zoxide

  Their words

  zoxide: a smarter cd command.

  kalwabed.com

Author of The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans, and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast.

• Usessponsoredrcmnd.app

  Momentous Creatine Chews

  Their words

  I've relied on Momentous products for years now, and I take their creatine as a daily staple for strength, recovery, and—particularly—brain health.

  tim.blog

Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The risk of humanity destroying itself WITHOUT AI is the number nobody weighs, and AI is at least as likely to be what saves us.

  Their words

  the other thing I think people don’t often talk about is probability of doom without AI. So there’s all these other ways that humans can destroy themselves and it’s very possible, at least I believe so, that AI will help us become smarter, kinder to each other, more efficient.

  youtube.com

Zurich-based value investor who ran the Aquamarine Fund from 1997 to 2025 and wrote The Education of a Value Investor. He hosts the VALUEx gathering in Klosters and publishes a podcast and newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI-enhanced access to information makes copying top investors' strategies smarter than ever before.

  Their words

  There is more access to information than ever before. And that access is only enhanced by AI. Times could not be better for shameless cloners.

  Long Live the Shameless Clonersguyspier.com

Director of strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology; an OpenAI board member until November 2023, and writes Rising Tide.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Adapting over time is a workable answer to humans misusing AI and no answer at all to losing control of systems smarter than us.

  Their words

  But we do not have experience with the kinds of problems we’ll face if we build machines that are smarter and more capable than us, so I feel much less sanguine that an adaptation-based strategy will help us there.

  helentoner.substack.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

  Work smarter, not harder is bad advice, because the only way to find out what smart looks like is to work very hard first.

  Their words

  And so for me, the only way I can learn how to work smart is by working very, very hard and knowing that there's no shortcuts. And then when I finally figure out what smart is, when I work smart and work hard, it is that much better.

  youtube.com

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  Smarter Faster Better

  Their words

  My second book is about the science of productivity, and how to succeed with less stress and struggle, to get more done without sacrificing what we care about most.

  charlesduhigg.com

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Einstein's equation is much smarter than Einstein was: it knew about black holes, gravitational waves and the Big Bang while he did not.

  Their words

  And the punchline is the equation is much smarter than Albert Einstein because Albert Einstein did not know about the Big Bang, he didn’t know about gravitational waves, he didn’t know about black holes but his equation did.

  youtube.com

Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Evolution made human babies effectively premature, since bipedalism shrank pelvises while brains grew larger, forcing late fetal development outside the womb.

  Their words

  The problem is, when humans went bipedal, our pelvises got smaller, and as humans got smarter, our heads got bigger. So evolution had to get creative. Its solution: all human babies would be premies, born when they were still small enough to pass through a human pelvis.

  10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimesterwaitbutwhy.com

Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan; publishes long-form essays, walking newsletters and self-made books at craigmod.com.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Vanmoof X3

  Their words

  The Vanmoof is much smarter — the brain and software within it are refined, the app good, the acceleration curves smooth — but the bike is all custom components, and they aren't the highest quality at that.

  craigmod.com