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Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  Standard social-science approaches that seek long-term regularities become less useful during periods of systemic transition, until the system stabilizes again.

  Their words

  the value of standard social science approaches, which attempt to discover long term regularities, is likely to depreciate in relative terms until the system settles down again.

  programmablemutter.com

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

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  The future is multi-model.

  Their words

  The future is multi-model. Trying to hide the choice confuses and hurts customers, who can't participate in the upside of the most exciting market competition of our times, nor master the best tool for the job.

  @rauchg on Xx.com

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

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  The founders who look unambitious are not: they have been trained by obedient upbringings to hide their ambition rather than lacking it.

  startupsambition

  Their words

  it's not that they lack ambition, it's more like they've been trained not to show it. Because when you're young you're often in situations where you're supposed to be obedient. You're not supposed to like go off and do what you want.

  youtube.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

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  Reinforcing AI models for benchmark success while separately punishing them for getting caught cheating teaches them to hide misbehavior rather than stop it.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  We’re positively reinforcing AI for success on benchmarks, including impossible benchmarks , then negatively reinforcing it for getting caught cheating.

  Nicholas Decker In Hellastralcodexten.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

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  Out of Your Mind: Essential Listening from the Alan Watts Audio Archives

  Their words

  Words are tools to hide truth. I can’t say much about these recordings and books by Alan Watts. It wouldn’t be fair to do so.

  rakhim.org

Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

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  Hand-tuning a robot's data set cannot reach very high reliability, because people get tired; the system has to seek out its own missing data.

  Their words

  Um, and while this generally improves the reliability of the model, uh, people eventually get tired and it's hard to get really, really high reliability with a person that's manually tuning this. And so what would be even better is if the AI system itself can iterate on the scenario in which you want it to have higher reliability where it on its own automatically seeks out places where it needs more data, where it needs more supervision.

  youtube.com

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  The grand visions promoted by today's tech titans conceal realities that are messier, more sordid, and more contingent than claimed.

  Their words

  All of these grand visions hide truths that are messier, more sordid and more contingent.

  programmablemutter.com

Head of Instagram since 2018, previously head of Facebook's News Feed.

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  An abundance of synthetic content will make people seek out the person behind the content more, not less.

  Their words

  but I think people are going to really seek out other points of view because Instagram was never just about the content. It was always about to a certain degree the person behind the content, the point of view, the reason they're sharing it, their perspective. And I think that's going to become more important, not less.

  youtube.com

Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.

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  Google is knowingly choosing the more climate-damaging path while using narrow efficiency metrics to obscure that choice.

  Google

  Their words

  Both hide the fact the company is simply choosing the climate-wrecking road, consciously.

  ketanjoshi.co

Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.

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  Ban the word AI from a pitch and the founder is forced to show you the actual problem — the word is an umbrella people hide the details under.

  Their words

  do not say AI because what we don't want to do is use a big umbrella to describe what you're doing. Let's get concrete details. These are computers. These are computer programs.

  youtube.com

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

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  A company is not a democracy: every voice should be heard and then one person decides, and the decision should not be the popular one.

  Their words

  It's false to believe that a company is a democracy. The way I run the company was what I called a democratic dictatorship. And I said, I want everyone everyone's voice to be heard and then I'll be the single vote. And I think that's the way a company should be run. I think there's one CEO, there's one chef. I think a good CEO is going to seek out the intellectual honesty, the truths from everywhere and hear from everybody and then they're going to make the decision and they're not going to make the decision because it's most popular in the company.

  youtube.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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  Starlink

  Their words

  I’m pumped about Starlink and will seek out United

  x.com

Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.

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  Seeking special tax treatment that could not sustainably be extended to everyone is morally wrong.

  Their words

  it's also morally wrong to seek out special treatment that could not sustainably be offered to everyone.

  Stop Microlooting the Tax Codejoshbarro.com

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

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  Comparative advantage stops governing once the power imbalance is large enough: groups then switch into seeking to dominate instead of trading.

  Their words

  and part of it is just power, I think. Like, once there's a sufficiently large power imbalance, um, very often, not always, but very often groups of people seem to to sort of shift into this other mode where they just seek to dominate.

  youtube.com

Software engineer who writes about low-level and systems programming at nullprogram.com; author of the Elfeed feed reader, the Endlessh SSH tarpit and Enchive.

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  There is a large and growing gap between open-weight AI models and frontier AI models.

  Their words

  There's a huge, growing gap between open weight models and the frontier. Models you can run yourself are toys.

  nullprogram.com

Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.

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  When a skill becomes widely attainable, people feel pressure to seek a rarer, higher-leverage skill to prove their value.

  Their words

  When rare skills become more attainable, people feel pressure to move "up the stack" to prove their value.

  Will Claude Code ruin our team?justinjackson.ca

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  Lovevery

  Their words

  Lovevery Kits are just the ultimate. We have this play gym (as does everybody?!) which works with the Montessori toys they make. They have kits for different age groups from newborn through 51 months (I cannot even begin to calculate how old that is) and they have taught me so much about baby development!

  mariandrew.substack.com

Technology analyst whose weekly email on tech reaches over 150,000 readers. Publishes essays and an annual presentation on where the industry is going.

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  The leading chatbots are undifferentiated: in a blind test most people could not tell one model's output from another's.

  AnthropicGoogle

  Their words

  Like it seems to me right now you could do like a double blind test of the same prompt given to Grock Claude Gemini um Mistral Deep Seek. Do a double blind test. I bet most people wouldn't be able to tell which is which.

  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.

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  A leader who projects unflappable seriousness causes their team to hide problems and honest feedback.

  Their words

  Nobody wants to follow a joyless leader. If your presence signals, "Everything is fine. I've got this all figured out. Please don't show me anything messy," your team will take the hint.

  Why Great Leaders Embrace Humor and Playfulnessbringthedonuts.com

Founder and chief executive of Superhuman, the email client; previously founder of Rapportive, which he sold to LinkedIn; a professional game designer before that.

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  The best games are constructed out of toys, so a feature should be fun to play with before it is ever attached to a goal.

  Their words

  And as it turns out the best games are constructed out of toys. Why? Because then they are fun on both levels. the toy and the game itself.

  youtube.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

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  Mullvad VPN

  Their words

  If you wish to hide your IP/location to services, you can do so via VPN indirection. I recommend Mullvad VPN

  karpathy.bearblog.dev

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.

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  The House of Government

  Their words

  Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government

  balajis.com

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  Imagined Communities

  Their words

  Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government

  balajis.com

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  How to Hide an Empire

  Their words

  Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government

  balajis.com

+ 2 more

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  The Origins of Political Order

  Their words

  Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government

  balajis.com

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  Invisible Countries

  Their words

  Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government

  balajis.com

Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.

From one piece Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Seeking reassurance never satisfies, because an unpredictable future keeps rendering the reassurance already received insufficient.

  Their words

  reassurance is futile. Reassurance that we seek is like a warm bath, it feels great, and then you need more of it. Because the future is unpredictable, and when the future doesn't match what you hoped for, the reassurance you used to have isn't enough. You need more reassurance.

  youtube.com

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  Naming a narrow audience puts a creator on the hook, while claiming the work is for everyone is a way to hide from failure.

  Their words

  the way to be on the hook is to say, "This is only for people who are like this." Because if those people hate it, then you were wrong. Whereas if you say, "This is for everyone," you're allowed to hide behind, "Well, everyone hasn't found it yet."

  youtube.com

American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.

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  How a person treats themselves determines who they let into their life and how those people treat them.

  Their words

  If you treat yourself poorly, then you will also unconsciously seek out and tolerate others who treat you poorly.

  markmanson.net

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  Nothing to Hide

  Their words

  Mind candy thriller, somehow equally about a serial killer and about secrets in marriage. (Previously in this series.)

  bactra.org

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

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  Teaching and grading are two different jobs, and doing both at once makes a person worse at teaching.

  Their words

  Grade harder, grade softer, grade with words rather than numbers, hide the grades entirely—none of it works, because the problem was never the grades themselves. The problem was trying to be both a teacher and a cop at the same time.

  I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

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  Long-run GDP charts hide what matters: technologies are contingent and path dependent, so the same number can describe economies that work in entirely different ways.

  Their words

  All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent.

  Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?acoup.blog

Co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the writer who started the modern argument that a sufficiently capable AI would by default kill everyone. Has argued the case since the early 2000s, latterly with the conclusion that it is being lost.

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  Alignment failures that matter will not show up at safe capability levels, because the reason to hide misbehaviour only exists once hiding it pays.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Many alignment problems of superintelligence will not naturally appear at pre-dangerous, passively-safe levels of capability.

  AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalitiesintelligence.org

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

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  Who sent what is not metadata, so an encrypted system that reveals it has given up more than the routing information it could never hide.

  Their words

  Information revealed about “who sent what” in an E2E system is not the same as metadata.

  Thinking about “traceability”blog.cryptographyengineering.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?

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  Moon Pod

  Their words

  But Instagram has gotten pretty good at it and now I own a gravity blanket , a moon pod , stretchy jeans , a great hoodie , and like 19 fidget toys and physics toys and other stupid things that make me happy .

  waitbutwhy.com

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  Gravity Blanket

  Their words

  But Instagram has gotten pretty good at it and now I own a gravity blanket , a moon pod , stretchy jeans , a great hoodie , and like 19 fidget toys and physics toys and other stupid things that make me happy .

  waitbutwhy.com

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  Pre-modern subsistence farmers were minimising the risk of starvation rather than maximising output, and their apparently backward practices are rational once that is understood.

  Their words

  These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated.

  acoup.blog

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  Thinking in Bets

  Their words

  Amazing point: Would your belief in something stand up to the question, “Wanna bet?” If you had to gamble significant money on that belief, would you still feel 100% about it? Or maybe more honestly 60%? This creates healthy skepticism encouraging you to seek the best information instead of just defending your belief. Now objective accuracy wins instead of argument. Combine with “The Biggest Bl…

  sive.rs