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16 September
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
I was trying to see if I could find one of my earliest uses of MrNugget but sadly this archive doesn't show the usernames: https://t.co/GoPnLfieUP Introduction to GNU screen, 22 years ago. Multiplexin' for two decades, brother. Quoting @thorstenball FAQ, answered. Related
15 September
Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.
J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small, splendid essay collect…
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14 September
American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.
13 September
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
Reasoning from scratch round 3: This time, I cover generating a verifier for... a) ...evaluation (base model versus any future model improvement) b) ...the reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) training later on 00:00 Introduction 01:21 Four approaches to LLM evaluation 07:20 Verifiers and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards 10:52 Notebook setup and dependencies 13:43 Section 3.1 Building a math verifier 18:57 Section 3.2 Loading a pre-trained model to generate text 24:34 Generating and displaying model answers 29:23 Section 3.3 Implementing a wrapper for easier tex… LLMs Related
7 September
Clinical psychologist and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF. His 2010 meta-analysis established psychodynamic therapy as an evidence-based treatment; he has argued ever since that "evidence-based therapy" is used as a marketing term.
6 September
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
Reasoning from scratch round 2: In this video, I cover the text generation process in LLMs and KV caching (to prepare the base model before adding reasoning techniques in the upcoming ones). 00:00 Introduction and reasoning model demo 01:55 How to work through the book 05:00 Chapter 2 overview 08:25 Checking PyTorch and hardware support 10:26 Apple silicon and MPS caveats 15:00 Cloud GPU options 16:08 Tokens and tokenization 18:20 Qwen3 and the Reasoning From Scratch package 23:05 Encoding and decoding text 26:24 Downloading weights and selecting a device 31:01 Loading the pretrained Qwen3 mo… LLMs Related
5 September
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
I asked a local instantiation of google/gemma4:31b-mlx to introduce itself to my new research assistants and point at its own workspace. What came back was a meditation on Plato, salamander brains, and why you should treat it like an eccentric roommate: **ThothBot Makes an Appearance in My RA-Group Telegram Chat: FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS** Living & working in Berkeley, California: An AI writes an introduction to my research assistants, & PanGram/SubStack grades it 100% not-slop; or, what... 1/ Google Related
31 August
Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.
Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.
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The biggest failure with the TipKit introduction is that it ignored the past and how apps have historically been built.
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furbo.org
26 August
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.
Here's my conversation with @DHH. He is back for round 2! It was an epic fun 5 hour conversation about the future of programming, AI, Linux, and human civilization. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 1:27 - Introduction 2:56 - Programming with AI agents 18:14 - How software will change 27:30 - AI impact on open source 37:21 - Building Omarchy Linux distro 47:05 - Vibe coding vs agentic engineering 1:00:06 - The end of manual programming 1:10:24 - Advice for programmers 1:22:30 - Surviving Internet Hate 1:31:46 - Programming set… Omarchy Linux Related
22 August
Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.
21 August
Sociologist at Duke University writing on markets, exchange and moral order, and on plain-text and data-visualisation tools for social science.
16 August
Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.
Their words
Spent endless hours digging through The Book. It’s very well written and organized and was a tremendous help in my CS studies.
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rakhim.org
Their words
Nice and entertaining introduction to the ideas of mindfulness and meditation.
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rakhim.org
Their words
Dark nights, lots of coffee… This was fun!
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rakhim.org
11 August
Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.
28 July
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.
Here's my conversation with Gary Gallagher, a leading historian of the American Civil War. We discuss the causes of the war, the economics and politics of slavery, military strategy, Lincoln, Grant, Lee, the Lost Cause, the Confederate Flag, and the history of extreme political division in our country from before the Civil War to today. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 1:29 - Introduction 1:52 - What caused the Civil War? 11:49 - Slavery 39:23 - Lincoln 54:19 - Grant vs Lee 1:03:13 - Could the Civil War have been avoided? 1:1… America Related
10 July
Interviewer; the Dwarkesh Podcast runs long, heavily researched conversations with AI researchers, historians and economists.
15 May
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
9 April
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.
Here's my conversation with historian Lars Brownworth all about the Vikings, from the start of the Vikings Age to the conquest of Europe and beyond. This was an epic & mind-blowing conversation. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 1:17 - Introduction 2:37 - The start of the Viking Age 12:30 - Viking military strategy, tactics & technology 26:13 - Ragnar Lothbrok 35:40 - The Great Heathen Army 40:23 - Rollo and Normandy 50:34 - Viking religion and Valhalla 1:01:06 - Viking explorers 1:06:13 - Vikings in North America 1:19:35 - Vi… Europe America Related
23 March
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.
Here's my conversation with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the most valuable & one of the most influential companies in the history of human civilization. It is the engine powering the AI revolution. This was a fascinating & inspiring conversation, in parts super-technical on engineering of every part of the AI stack, memory, power, supply chain (TSMC, ASML, etc), in parts about leadership & psychology, and in parts personal & philosophical about life, consciousness, mortality, and human nature. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 0:33… Related
1 March
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.
Here's my conversation with Rick Beato (@rickbeato), a musician, music educator, producer, songwriter, and host of a YouTube channel that celebrates great musicians & musical ideas, and helps millions of people fall in love with great music all over again. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 0:44 - Guitar solos 4:43 - Gypsy jazz and Django Reinhardt 6:14 - Bebop jazz 10:27 - Perfect pitch vs relative pitch 15:04 - Learning to play guitar 38:34 - Miles Davis 44:01 - Bass guitar 45:08 - Greatest guitar solos of all time 1:14:23 - 27 Cl… Related
14 January
Writer and artist, author of Steal Like an Artist; publishes a weekly newsletter and an annual list of the books he read.
Their words
One of the most gorgeously-produced books I read, with illustrations by Matthew Forsythe.
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austinkleon.com
4 January
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.
Their words
Alex Mayyasi, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life is a useful introduction to economic concepts.
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marginalrevolution.com
18 November 2025
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
29 October 2025
Creator of the Zig programming language; president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation.
Zig's New Async I/O (Text Version) In celebration of the std.Io introduction patchset landing today, here is the text version of a short, interactive demo I gave at Zigtoberfest 2025. This is a preview of the new async I/O primitives that will be availab…
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30 September 2025
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.
Their words
This is a short (~150 pp), brisk first book on the topic for physicists. Most of the book --- the first ten chapters --- are good introduction to common models of spin glasses.
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bactra.org
28 July 2025
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
28 April 2025
Co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face; writes about open models and where he thinks the field is wrong.
[Past weekends side project] A quick introduction to contextual speech models I made some interactive visualisations to explain a bit better how recent contextual speech models and audio tokenization work (e.g. Sesame's demo). Related
18 March 2025
Belgian engineering lead, Microsoft MVP and public speaker. Creator of Front Matter, a headless CMS extension for Visual Studio Code.
Introduction to Demo Time – Use Visual Studio Code as your presentation tool Related
6 November 2024
Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.
Their words
A delightfully insane introduction to systematic invention.
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worrydream.com
24 May 2024
Founder of Pinboard; writes Idle Words — talks and essays on the web, aviation, politics and travel.
17 April 2024
Author of Fluent Forever and founder of the app of the same name; teaches pronunciation first and vocabulary through images rather than translation.
1 October 2023
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.
Their words
It turns out that the highest gains from trade come from the introduction of new goods altogether, just as Malthus had suggested.
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tylercowen.com
18 August 2023
Software engineer and a long-time technical lead of the Go programming language; author of plan9port and of the research.swtch.com essays.
18 June 2023
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.
Their words
A funny book explaining the basics of AI! The subtitle is How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place. A great introduction to AI. With a cute cartoon mascot. The title is from her training an AI to write romantic greeting cards.
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sive.rs
1 April 2022
Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.
Transformers for software engineers Ever since its introduction in the 2017 paper, Attention is All You Need, the Transformer model architecture has taken the deep-learning world by storm. Initially introduced for machine translation, it has become the to…
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11 January 2022
Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.
Their words
After years of people recommending him to me, I finally took the plunge into the literary world of Wendell Berry. Now I can't help but wonder what took me so long. This 2018 collection of Berry's best essays is a fantastic introduction into his genre-defining polemic style, which mixes razor-sharp commentary with a poetry grounded in lived experience, to argue on behalf of land, the environment, and a slower, richer approach to life.
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calnewport.com
1 June 2020
Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.
Their words
Not only is this a wonderful foundation for Fourier analysis, with a surprising and satisfying application to prime numbers given in the last chapter, but it's also a good starting point for analysis as a whole. Stein and Shakarchi have a series of four excellent books on the foundations of analysis, based on a now-famous series of lectures given at Princeton.
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3blue1brown.com
Their words
As the title suggests, this offers a highly pictorial introduction to complex analysis. I would not use this as the only text to learn about complex analysis, but Needham does a marvelous job of conveying the beauty of the subject, with numerous helpful intuitions for otherwise famously tricky ideas.
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3blue1brown.com
Their words
Despite my aim to keep this list purely about math books, I cannot help but include this one in the list. Simply put, it's one of the most enjoyable textbooks I've ever read, giving a very satisfying first-principles understanding of what thermodynamic concepts like temperature and entropy really are, and how we can to understand them.
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3blue1brown.com
16 September 2019
Mathematical biologist; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death and How to Expect the Unexpected.
Their words
The Art of Statistics is a really accessible and comprehensive introduction to statistics. It's not only about the tools of statistics, but it also goes through lots of interesting and relevant areas where statistics can help us make important decisions.
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fivebooks.com
29 January 2019
Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.
Their words
David Kaiser has contributed an introduction to the book (available here , or, if this doesn't work, try here ) which does an excellent job of putting the material in historical and intellectual context
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math.columbia.edu
18 May 2018
Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.
Their words
But I hope if they read our Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction, they'll at least have some idea why he is so significant.
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fivebooks.com
30 October 2016
Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.
1 October 2016
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
Their words
Seems designed as an entertaining introduction to auction theory for the layperson.
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danluu.com
Their words
Unfortunately, most of the key exercises don't have solutions, so you can't check your work.
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danluu.com
Their words
Seems designed as an entertaining introduction to auction theory for the layperson. Requires no mathematical background and relegates math to the small print.
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danluu.com
+ 1 more
Their words
Classic, but dated and riddled with errors, with no errata available.
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danluu.com
22 April 2014
Creator of the Zig programming language; president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation.
Their words
I recommend this excellent Introduction to EBU R128 by Florian Camerer:
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andrewkelley.me
24 February 2014
Freelance research analyst and writer of the blog Aceso Under Glass, known for 'epistemic spot checks' of non-fiction claims.
Their words
So if you're either looking for an introduction to this issue or share my very strange definition of light reading, I highly recommend this book.
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acesounderglass.com
2 June 2013
British writer of biography and intellectual history; author of How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, At the Existentialist Cafe and Humanly Possible.
Their words
This is a fabulous, clear introduction to existentialist thought. It's also very philosophically rigorous.
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fivebooks.com
Their words
Richard's Polt's Heidegger: An Introduction is one of the best I've come across. It's a fantastically clear and concise exploration of Heidegger's philosophy, concentrating on his first great work, Being and Time, though he also covers the later writings of Heidegger.
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fivebooks.com
17 September 2012
Software engineer and a long-time technical lead of the Go programming language; author of plan9port and of the research.swtch.com essays.
Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
Got it