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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.

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  Nervous credit-market sentiment around the AI datacenter buildout could suddenly reverse and collapse the boom.

  data centers

  Their words

  And when market opinion is nervous, it might turn and collapse the boom at any moment.

  braddelong.substack.com

Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.

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  The pull of fundamentals that used to reverse market momentum has weakened, so betting on mean reversion is more dangerous than it was.

  Their words

  there is evidence that the reversal effect has weakened over time, leaving investors who bet on mean reversion and a return to fundamentals in the lurch

  aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com

Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

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  Rapidly deploying renewable energy now would slow further warming rather than reverse it

  energy

  Their words

  At this point it won't lower the temperature rapidly, but it could keep it from climbing rapidly.

  Reality intrudesbillmckibben.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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  The cost of major tunnel projects should not be attributed to the cost of surface electrification when benchmarking rail costs.

  Their words

  one should never apportion the cost of the RER or Stammstrecke tunnels to the cost of surface electrification

  Electrification Costs and Confounderspedestrianobservations.com

Creator of the iPod and co-creator of the iPhone at Apple, founder of Nest, and author of Build.

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  Devices should be built voice-first, with keyboard and touch demoted to second and third, the exact reverse of how the smartphone was layered.

  Their words

  We need to flip it. We need to absolutely flip it, and we have to say, and this is what I always wanted to do with Nest, which is I want to remove displays, and we need to have voice as the number one primary feature, and you build around voice.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, which he started in 2011 while studying product design at Stanford.

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  Computers and phones isolate people from one another, and the point of the next computer is to reverse that.

  Their words

  one of the things that I noticed about computers and I think today with mobile phones, uh is that in many ways they isolate us from one another, right? They actually take us out of our social interactions.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Ethereum. Publishes long essays on mechanism design, governance and what cryptography is for, and returns to earlier positions to say which parts they no longer hold.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  SearXNG

  Their words

  I gave pi a skill for using the search engine SearXNG (which aggregates many search engines together at the same time), and one for calling into a daemon that I wrote that gives it access to read my email and Signal messages, and send-to-self, and send to others only with human confirmation.

  vitalik.eth.limo

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  NixOS

  Their words

  The way that I use this daemon is that I run it on NixOS as a service, accepting requests on port 6000.

  vitalik.eth.limo

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

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  The frightening part of giving agents more access is not bad code but irreversible action, so the guardrails to build next are guardrails on reversibility.

  Their words

  You cannot just reverse that, right? It's just not working. So, I do think that we need to build out the whole guardrails for the reversibility of actions because that actually where things get really really scary.

  youtube.com

Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.

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  The growth of the religiously unaffiliated in America has stopped and gone into reverse.

  America

  Their words

  There’s clearly been a numerical decline in the nones. That seems pretty hard to ignore now, and it’s showing up in multiple data sources.

  America Got a Little More Religious. No, Really.graphsaboutreligion.com

Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.

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  Rebuilding American manufacturing is a decades-long educational and cultural project, not something tariffs can do.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.

  molsonhart.com

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

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  Reverse trials work where a product accumulates lock-in, which is why they suit B2B tools and rarely beat an ordinary free trial in consumer products.

  Their words

  I think if you have especially a B2B feature where you may have some lock in reverse trials can be super powerful. You just want to get people in there. You don't need to ask for their credit card because they're using your CRM or they're investing quite a lot of time in like building out, you know, material and content. And so by the time that window drops, you actually like feel, oh man, I probably should keep this and and start paying. I think for a lot of consumer products, it's a little bit harder for that to work. And so I've typically seen more just normal free trials be be the norm.

  youtube.com

Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.

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  Complete reverse-engineering of neural networks is a less promising research direction than studying model biology and applying interpretability usefully

  Their words

  I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).

  MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29)neelnanda.io

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

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  Covering desert in solar panels is good for the desert: it shades the ground, holds moisture, and would pay for reversing desertification.

  solar

  Their words

  And the impact of solar array on desert is arguably positive because it shades the ground and improves like soil moisture retention. Um there like if you wanted to reverse desertification, you would basically just deploy solar panels on it and that would pay for the process.

  youtube.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

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  Cut and cover is still often the cheapest way to build a subway and rich countries have abandoned it anyway, because the disruption is no longer tolerated.

  Their words

  Cut and cover will sometimes be the best choice from a basic cost-benefit perspective, as will elevated rail, and both are useful to have in the tunnel construction toolbox for that reason.

  Why we stopped building subways cheaplyworksinprogress.news

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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  Daemon

  Their words

  The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, The Sovereign Individual, The Truth Machine, Daemon

  balajis.com

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  The Truth Machine

  Their words

  The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, The Sovereign Individual, The Truth Machine, Daemon

  balajis.com

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  Broken Money

  Their words

  The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, The Sovereign Individual, The Truth Machine, Daemon

  balajis.com

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  The Bitcoin Standard

  Their words

  The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, The Sovereign Individual, The Truth Machine, Daemon

  balajis.com

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  The Sovereign Individual

  Their words

  The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, The Sovereign Individual, The Truth Machine, Daemon

  balajis.com

Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Politics now runs mood first and ideas second, the reverse of how argument worked for most of the twentieth century.

  Their words

  It seems we're driven much more quickly by moods rather than thought-through ideas. Right now, it seems the ideas they follow the political mood and try to put together the underpinning of it where it really was the opposite for much of the 20th century.

  youtube.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

From one piece 10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  A growth team's ceiling is a ten to fifteen percent lift, which is never enough to reverse a company that is already sliding.

  Their words

  Growth team can optimize. Growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15% maybe that's enough for you even that like is on the upper end of what growth team would be able to do if there is a slow down trajectory

  youtube.com

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  Hiring a head of growth to reverse a declining business is destined to fail, because the cause of the decline is deeper than the missing team.

  Their words

  If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team.

  youtube.com

Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

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  Government payments and benefits aimed at raising birth rates do not reverse the decline.

  government

  Their words

  Across the OECD, governments are upping their spending. But a wealth of research suggests these fail to mitigate the downward trend.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We are wasting our time trying to reverse the climate crisis instead of building the technology to survive it.

  Their words

  I think you have some guys that have their finger on the pulse there. We need to start thinking about how we’re going to survive this, not that we’re going to make it go away.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.

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  Investing well requires reversing the human instinct to grow excited as prices rise and fearful as they fall.

  Their words

  People tend to get excited about investments when stocks are going up and they get depressed when they're going down. And I think that's just inherently human. You have to reverse that. You have to get excited when things get cheaper and you got to get concerned when things get more expensive.

  youtube.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

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  Platform decay is the result of specific decisions by identifiable people rather than impersonal historical forces, which is precisely what makes it reversible.

  Their words

  I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

  My McLuhan lecture on enshittificationpluralistic.net

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.

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  The long decline in mortality is not guaranteed to continue: new shocks and old unsolved diseases can reverse it.

  Their words

  None of these trends are a given.

  scientificdiscovery.dev

Founder of Amazon in 1994 and of the space company Blue Origin in 2000.

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  Decisions split into reversible two-way doors and irreversible one-way doors, and only the one-way doors deserve slow, deliberate scrutiny.

  Their words

  If you make the wrong decision, if it's a two-way door decision, you pick a door, you walk out and you spend a little time there. It turns out to be the wrong decision, you can come back in and pick another door. Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one-way door decisions. You go in that door, you're not coming back. And those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully.

  youtube.com

Development economist; argues that letting people move to rich countries does more for the poor than aid, and wrote Let Their People Come.

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  Demography is about to turn the rich world’s problem from finding a job for every person into finding a person for every job.

  Their words

  But once the demographics reverse, the challenge will be to find a person for every job. In the coming years, the impact of demographic changes is going to lead to chronic labor shortages.

  english.elpais.com

Alignment researcher at Anthropic; co-led OpenAI's superalignment team until 2024, and writes Musings on the Alignment Problem.

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  Once model weights leave their owner's control the loss is irreversible, which is why securing them is the precondition for governing AI at all.

  Their words

  Moreover, model exfiltration is likely impossible to reverse.

  Self-exfiltration is a key dangerous capabilityaligned.substack.com

Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Nightmare

  Their words

  Nightmare – an intro to reverse engineering. I did a few problems and it was really fun.

  jvns.ca

Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.

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  The Pigeon Tunnel

  Their words

  The rest of the book is great, do buy it!

  sriramk.com

Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Ego Tunnel

  Their words

  Metzinger has also written a trade book called The Ego Tunnel, which is a shorter, more accessible account of the same core ideas. It's from 2009, so it's been around a while, but it's a really wonderful book.

  fivebooks.com

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  The person who specifies a new building system carries all its risk and none of its reward, a reverse moral hazard that keeps construction innovation out.

  Their words

  In many cases, the person specifying a new system won’t capture the upside from actually using it - they’ll be under a sort of reverse moral hazard, where the benefits accrue to the rest of the project team, but the risks will accrue only to them.

  Why It's Hard to Innovate in Constructionconstruction-physics.com

Sociologist and founder of Bismarck Analysis; writes on live players, institutional decay and why societies lose knowledge.

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  In a dysfunctional society the loss of working knowledge becomes routine, and attempts to reverse-engineer what was lost do not always succeed.

  Their words

  That knowledge never should have been lost in the first place, but in a dysfunctional society, such loss of knowledge becomes the rule.

  Why Civilizations Collapsesamoburja.com