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Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  AI has passed nearly every human at finding security vulnerabilities, because the work is chaining together small flaws that are harmless on their own.

  Their words

  So the irony here is that when you look at that field, it seems like we've reached levels of intelligence that virtually no human can match because many of these security holes are about stringing combo moves together. You find one little vulnerability here that by itself might not be the worst thing in the world, but then you combine it with four others, and suddenly you have RCE, remote command execution. Humans who are able to do that are very rare.

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British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.

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  An Immense World

  Their words

  This is a funny, heartfelt, and (perhaps overly) thorough book. It will gleefully send you down rabbit holes

  shkspr.mobi

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

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  The UK will need to build more reservoirs to cope with future water-starved summers

  Their words

  If the UK is to survive water-starved summers in the future, it will need to build more reservoirs and plug holes in our existing pipelines at the same time.

  The UK needs to build more reservoirshannahritchie.substack.com

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

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  Multi-Paradigm Design for C++

  Their words

  Multi-Paradigm Design for C++ by James O. Coplien. Twenty years after reading this, the core techniques are still with me. These are commonality analysis, where the purpose is to identify families of systems, and variability analysis, which focuses on capturing the domain parameters that vary. In essence: the foundation of great software design.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

Professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M; writes The Climate Brink with Zeke Hausfather.

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  The intense U.S. heat of the 1930s was driven by regional natural variability plus human-caused poor land management (the Dust Bowl), not global warming.

  America

  Their words

  the heat of the 1930s was a regional event, due to a combination of unforced variability and human activities (poor agricultural land management).

  Raw Data, Wrong Answerstheclimatebrink.com

Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.

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  Since 1970, greenhouse gases explain essentially all observed global warming, with natural forcings and internal variability playing a negligible role.

  Their words

  since 1970, natural forcings have been roughly flat, internal variability averages out over the longer period, and greenhouse gases explain essentially all of the observed warming.

  What drove the early 20th century warming?theclimatebrink.com

Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

From one piece Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Supermassive black holes did not grow by merging smaller ones — there has not been enough time — they collapsed directly out of primordial matter.

  Their words

  We don’t think that the universe has had enough time to make them from stars that just merge. We know that two black holes can merge and make a bigger black hole and then those can merge and make a bigger black hole. We don’t think there’s been enough time for that.

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  Black holes are not the same thing as dead stars; they are a more general and more fundamental phenomenon than the end state of a star.

  Their words

  But then I think that there’s a confusion that dead stars, these very, very massive stars that die, are synonymous with the phenomenon of black hole. And it’s really not the case. Black holes are more general and more fundamental than just the death state of a star.

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Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

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  More capable AI agents are more likely to find and exploit flaws in their reward functions.

  Their words

  A more intelligent agent is more capable of finding "holes" in the design of reward function and exploiting the task specification-in other words, achieving higher proxy rewards but lower true rewards.

  Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learninglilianweng.github.io

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.

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  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.

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

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  Complice

  Their words

  (Complice is my favorite app for making lists of what I want to do today.) This helps me recover quickly from unintentionally going down rabbit holes.

  benkuhn.net