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Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

• testit — A simple package for testing R packages

  Commitsassert(): check () conditions inside a {} block passed as a call argument (#29)

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Former option trader and risk analyst, now a distinguished professor at NYU. Author of the Incerto essay series, including The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.

• My points: Identities are not rigid designations, they are dynamic. The Levantine splits were along different lines (Qaysi Yamani, Green/Blue, etc.). Genetics is also misinterpreted. I use it to deny genetic claims. Localities are the basic units, localism is BOTTOM-UP, and fractal. Nation-States are recent, 19th C. fragile constructions.
  Quoting@lebkittGreat discussion on the ever-evolving nature of Lebanese identity, with some well-placed corrections to our own national myths, particularly Phoenicianism. I’ve encountered many of these arguments before through the writings and posts of @PZalloua and @nntaleb, but they were far more engaging in an…

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Sociologist at Duke University writing on markets, exchange and moral order, and on plain-text and data-visualisation tools for social science.

• nycdemog — The nycdemog package provides county-, tract-, and block-level demographic data for the five counties of New York City, derived from the US Census Bureau via tidycensus. It provides a set…

  Commitsnycmaps dependency for github action · Edits · add github actions

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Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.

• omg today I went for a run and was able to breathe entirely through my nose. this has literally never happened or even come close to happening before in my life. I’ve never run a block breathing through my nose
  Quoting@noampomskymy allergist told me fixing my dust mite allergy might help my shrimp allergy so I decided to truly put ILIT to the test today by eating a shrimp salad accidentally served to me. I’m horribly allergic to shrimp so either this works or I’ll be tweeting from a swiss hospital soon

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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.

• Rockefeller used the government to block rivals a century ago

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Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since July 2026 and leader of the Labour Party. MP for Makerfield since a by-election in June 2026; Mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 before that.

• We've all been there. You wake up feeling unwell, try to get an appointment, and before you know it half the day has disappeared. When you're sick, the last thing you should be worrying about is how you're going to get the help you need. That's why we're expanding Pharmacy First. The idea is simple: Qualified pharmacists can assess patients, dispense medicines and prescribe treatment for a range of common conditions, helping people get care quickly and close to home. So you don’t have to go to hospital, and you don’t need to book a GP appointment. Just walk into your local pharmacy and get th…

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Statistician at Columbia; writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and wrote Bayesian Data Analysis.

• Hey–here’s an R package for imputing Census data using iterative proportional fitting on available margins.

  Gustavo pointed us to this project (see also here) by David Dorer to impute data to lower census levels (block/tract) from PUMAs (public use microdata areas, as defined by the U.S. Census). From a quick glance this look…

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Writer of the 25iq blog, where he distils "a dozen things I've learned" from investors, founders and thinkers. Author of Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor and A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs.

• Starlink pays ~$15 million in COGs for a Falcon 9. They fill it ~ completely since they optimize for F9. Even assume $20M COGs. Third parties pay $74 million retail for a F9 and can't fill it (3P payloads ≠ F9 optimized). Most people block this out; Retail price ≠ COGs!

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Canadian software developer and writer, co-editor of the XML and Atom specifications and formerly of Sun Microsystems, Google and AWS. Has written the blog ongoing since 2003.

• Petition to block MAGA PE scum from owning crucial Canadian payment infrastructure, namely Moneris:

  ourcommons.ca

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Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

• What’s the problem w using LLMs to write stuff you want other people to read -emails, articles, posts- and why are people (like me!) so incredibly hostile that they will block you/mute you/block your domain, to never read anything from you again? Bryan spells it out. Read it:
  Quoting@bcantrill.bsky.socialYour intellectual fly is open bcantrill.dtrace.org/2025/12/05/y...

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Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.

• Deflating Trust

  Plus! The Subscription Stabilizer; Externalities; Schelling Points Very Different from Ours; In-kind Payments; Fractal Media

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FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.

• FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 is now available: https://t.co/BeAEaG6Srq This being a release candidate, by definition this might be what ships as 14.5-RELEASE next week. If there are any critical issues which should block the release, you have approximately 96 hours to find and report them.

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Developer and podcaster; created Instapaper and Overcast, co-founded Tumblr, and co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast.

• RE: https://infosec.exchange/@clayton/117175171619298911 It's OK. This feature is awesome, and one I use heavily. Every social network needs a few mutes here and there. Nobody inherently deserves anyone’s attention. If someone replies in a way that makes me think, "I'd rather not hear from this person again,” I just mute forever. No aggressive block, no report or feedback, no way for them to know. It's not meant to send a message, get revenge, or influence anyone else — just tailor my feed for me.

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Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

• Most people have never heard of siRNA, but it’s going to change the face of medicine. https://t.co/RLP1pxuICA Much drug development today involves developing chemicals to fit into proteins and block them. But this almost never turns out as planned: many drug candidates get broken down in the body, interfere with other proteins and cause toxic side effects, or fail to be absorbed at all. The majority of proteins are considered undruggable, because they lack a pocket for drugs to bind, or they are ‘intrinsically disordered’, without coherent structure. What if, instead of trying to block the pr…

  worksinprogress.co

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Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.

• I split problems into two groups: muddy puddles and leaky ceilings. Some problems are like muddy puddles. The way to clear a muddy puddle is to leave it alone. The more you mess with it, the muddier it becomes. Many of the problems I dream up when I'm overthinking or worrying or ruminating fall into this category. Is life really falling apart or am I just in a sour mood? Is this as hard as I'm making it or do I just need to go work out? Drink some water. Go for a walk. Get some sleep. Go do something else and give the puddle time to turn clear. Other problems are like a leaky ceiling. Ignore…

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Co-founder and chief investment officer of Cambria Investment Management. He has written several books on quantitative asset allocation, blogs at Meb Faber Research and hosts The Meb Faber Show.

• ShortWhy Carson Block Calls China Uninvestable

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Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

• aidetector — A small web app for paragraph-level AI-text detection. Paste markdown on the left, press Analyze, and each prose block comes back tinted on a human→AI scale.

  CommitsInitial commit: paragraph-level AI-text detection web app

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Pseudonymous writer; posts careful, funny investigations of everyday questions — air quality, seed oils, arguing, chess — usually by reading the studies.

• Is there any point of making an onion service if your clearweb site doesn't block Tor? Maybe just to reduce pressure on exist nodes?

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Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.

• Our Likely Future Filter: World Govt

  The great filter (a term I coined) is all the things that block simple dead matter from evolving into an advanced civilization easily seen from far away.

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Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

• PCE inflation came in high. And the details were even more worrying than the headline as the risk of inflation mounting outside the tariff/Iran affected sectors. Core PCE annual rate: 1 month: 3.9% 3 months: 3.5% 6 months: 4.1% 12 months: 3.4%

  inflationRelated

Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.

• Worrying is self-fulfilling; what to do instead

  Worrying makes things worse. Replace worry with preparation and strategic planning.

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

• Hear This

  Radical Listening could transform our politics and block the rise of the far right. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 7th May 2026 Most people have made up their minds, and nothing you can say will change the…

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Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.

• The Building Block Economy

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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.

• One thing I love about Anthropic is that our hiring process often includes a disclaimer that we will absolutely do something that zeros our equity if we think it's the best thing for the world. We are not anywhere close to that here—DOW can only block us from DOW contracts—but
  Quoting@AnthropicAIA statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

  AnthropicRelated

Release engineering manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. Keeps a public log at tylercipriani.com of every book he reads, with a rating and notes.

• Our block tends to go hard on Halloween decorations every year. This was my house:

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Release engineering manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. Keeps a public log at tylercipriani.com of every book he reads, with a rating and notes.

• ``` GET /about/ HTTP/1.1" 200 6659 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Thinkbot/0.5.8; +In_the_test_phase,_if_the_Thinkbot_brings_you_trouble,_please_block_its_IP_address._Thank_you.)" ``` hrm, "block its IP address"? ``` $ sudo awk '/Thinkbot/ {print "IP:",$2}' /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log | sort | uniq | wc -l 60 ``` Hosting things on the internet in 2025 is stupid.

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Egyptian front-end developer and course creator; writes for CSS-Tricks, publishes courses on Udemy and blogs at alialaa.dev.

• wp-blocks-course-text-box — === Boilerplate === Contributors: The WordPress Contributors Tags: block Tested up to: 5.7.0 Stable tag: 0.1.0 License: GPL-2.0-or-later License URI:

  CommitsUpdate dependencies

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Software engineer who worked on Chrome and Polymer at Google, and writes about the web, emoji and Elm at meowni.ca.

• This looks pretty cool, and can lead to actual useful tools for artists, like: segment this image, now replace *this* knife block with a salt shaker and swap it with the lemons for a better composition
  Quoting@AIatMetaToday we're releasing the Segment Anything Model (SAM) — a step toward the first foundation model for image segmentation. SAM is capable of one-click segmentation of any object from any photo or video + zero-shot transfer to other segmentation tasks ➡️

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Financial journalist; chief financial correspondent at Axios and host of the Slate Money podcast, previously a blogger at Reuters and author of The Phoenix Economy.

• Nota bene: Caldbeck vs robos

  Earlier this week, I published a column at Wired on Wealthfront, and how it has moved in a very worrying direction in recent weeks.

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Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

• Fractals on the Riemann Sphere

  In order to investigate the behaviour of Newton Fractals at infinity, I've plotted Newton Fractals on the Riemann sphere. Here's an animated video of a Newton Fractal plotted on the Riemann sphere using YouTube's 360° v…

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Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

• Introduction to Newton Fractals

  When I try to learn a new programming language, I don't write a hello world. Instead, I write a generator of newton fractals. Here's an example of a newton fractal:

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