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Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Award show wins are a useful, if imperfect, proxy for power shifts within an industry.

  Their words

  Award shows remain mostly silly and subjective, but they're an interesting directional proxy for power in the various industries

  Apple TV Dethrones HBOspyglass.org

General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.

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  Proxy advisers judge companies by rule-compliance rather than shareholder interest, because they grew out of fraud prevention.

  Their words

  they started from a place of corporate governance where they were looking out for fraud. And so so risk mitigation rather than shareholder interest. And so when you come at it from that perspective, you're like, there should be rules and people should adhere to the rules and when people get outside of the rules, that's bad.

  youtube.com

Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.

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  Token burn is the single most important proxy metric a company can watch today, because it measures whether people are trying at all.

  Their words

  What probably the single most important proxy metric that you can have it in a company today is token burn. Because what token burn says is your engineers are trying to do stuff or your non-engineers.

  From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com

Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

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  Calling dark matter and dark energy invented names for physicists' ignorance gets it exactly backwards: only extraordinary precision let us see that they are missing.

  energy

  Their words

  And so I would say, yes, we are just giving proxy names to things we don’t understand, but to dismiss that as some kind of, “Oh, they just don’t know…” It is actually quite the opposite.

  youtube.com

Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

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  More capable AI agents are more likely to find and exploit flaws in their reward functions.

  Their words

  A more intelligent agent is more capable of finding "holes" in the design of reward function and exploiting the task specification-in other words, achieving higher proxy rewards but lower true rewards.

  Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learninglilianweng.github.io

Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Hex

  Their words

  You might be skeptical of using synthetic data. After all, it’s not real data, so how can it be a good proxy? In my experience, it works surprisingly well. Some of my favorite AI products, like Hex use synthetic data to power their evals

  hamel.dev

Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Fiddler

  Their words

  Fiddler - The easy, clean, and powerful debugging proxy for checking out HTTP between here and there. It even supports sniffing SSL traffic.

  hanselman.com

Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan; publishes long-form essays, walking newsletters and self-made books at craigmod.com.

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  Speed is a good proxy for engineering quality: software that slows down on simple tasks suggests engineers who are not obsessive about detail.

  Their words

  Speed and reliability are often intuited hand-in-hand. Speed can be a good proxy for general engineering quality. If an application slows down on simple tasks, then it can mean the engineers aren’t obsessive detail sticklers.

  Fast Software, the Best Softwarecraigmod.com