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Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

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  A true pirate is defined by rejecting the authority of nations and empires altogether, not merely by breaking their laws.

  Their words

  To be a true pirate implies a broader disavowal. The pirate renounces the long-distance authorities of nations and empires.

  The Uses Of Terroradjacentpossible.substack.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

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  Transit-oriented development should be defined by walking distance to rail stations, not by zoning along arterial street corridors.

  Their words

  The reason is simple: TOD doesn't care about corridors but about the underlying transit, which is a subway, not a bus stopping every block.

  pedestrianobservations.com

AI researcher at OpenAI; built the poker systems Libratus and Pluribus and the Diplomacy agent Cicero, and works on reasoning models.

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  An outsider could have disproved the Erdős unit-distance conjecture with a public model, because nobody had tried spending $100,000 of compute on one question.

  Their words

  Um but it would be possible and it would have been possible for somebody to disprove the erdos unit distance conjecture before we did using a general purpose model. And nobody had explored sufficiently what happens if I put $100,000 worth of compute into 5.5 what could it do?

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Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

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  Reproductive incompatibility between diverging human lineages grows roughly as the square of their separation time, because it takes pairs of interacting genes.

  Their words

  there's as populations become more apart, there begins to be biological incompatibilities rapidly developing, probably as the square of the distance separation, because you need pairs of interacting genes, and therefore it's the square of the separation.

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American writer and long-term traveller. Blogs at tynan.com about travel, owning few possessions, habits and the gear he carries; author of Superhuman by Habit and Make It Big.

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  The point of a grueling long-distance hike is to endure hardship, not to enjoy the scenery.

  Their words

  The whole point of the AT, as far as I could tell, was to endure hardship, and I was about to quit before the first rainy hike and the tallest mountain.

  My Appalachian Trail Adventuretynan.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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  A theory gets abandoned when the old explanation becomes visibly insufficient: special relativity made Newtonian gravity's action at a distance impossible, and that was the forcing function.

  Their words

  Um and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.

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Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

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  Batteries will replace transmission as the cheapest way to keep the lights on, and the grid will shrink rather than grow.

  energy

  Their words, before

  we will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.

  Their words now

  Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.

Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.

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  At the end of life you meet the person you could have become, and the work of a life is minimising the distance to them.

  Their words

  I I I just feel at the end of life you meet the people the person you could have become. Um, and uh I So so you I think the work in life is try to minimize the difference between um that person and and who you actually ended up being.

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Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

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  T. rex hunted by endurance rather than speed: its foot is built for efficiency, which points at long-distance pursuit, not a sprint.

  Their words

  They're relatively efficient compared to a lot of other things, and particularly compared to the herbivores, so that means they're probably looking at long distance rather than speed.

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Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

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  The average distance an electron travels between where it is generated and where it is consumed is going to fall radically.

  Their words

  So it's just very clear that like the average distance the electron is going to travel between generation and consumption is going to decrease in the future pretty radically.

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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?

From one piece All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Pro 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Technological progress looks smooth and exponential from a distance but is actually made of individual S-curves up close.

  Their words

  If you zoom out on a story of technology, you usually see a big exponential curve. But if you look at the curve up close, you see that it's wavy, made of S-curves.

  All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com

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  Virtual-reality hangouts are the next step in humanity's long effort to close the gap of physical distance in communication.

  Their words

  It's the next step in a centuries-long human mission to conquer long-distance.

  All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com

Guardian columnist and environmental campaigner; wrote Feral and Regenesis, and argues for rewilding and against the food system as it is.

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  Long-distance food transport is what stops a local harvest failure from becoming a famine.

  Their words

  But without long-distance transport, many more would starve.

  The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed Peoplemonbiot.com