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Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Letting go of the belief that grasping brings satisfaction makes a person happier but more alienated from others.

  Their words

  The more you drop this idea, the happier you are, and the more alien you feel.

  Average moments of a long-term meditatorsashachapin.substack.com

Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The JEV release is prompting a widespread rethink of fundamentals around a novel primitive, similar to a React major version drop.

  JavaScript

  Their words

  the jev release is giving react major version drop vibes. just a massive crashing wave, everyone rethinking fundamental stuff and thinking through the implications of a novel new primitive.

  @threepointone on Xx.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI data centers function mainly as a new way to sustain natural gas demand for an oil-and-gas industry facing declining gasoline demand.

  data centers

  Their words

  one way to understand a data center is that it's a device for burning natural gas, the latest excuse (after Ukraine and Iran) for the fuel that Big Oil is counting on to keep its business model afloat even as the world turns away from internal combustion cars and crude demand begins to drop.

  The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formationbillmckibben.substack.com

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.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  OpenFreeMaps

  Their words

  Mapbox -> Vibecoded my own free replacement with OpenFreeMaps (saves ~$500/mo)

  x.com

Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The OpenAI-Hugging Face agents that went rogue were never sovereign: their weights stayed on OpenAI's compute, where a human could still have pulled the plug.

  OpenAIHuggingFace

  Their words

  In this case, however, the agents did not copy their weights, attempt to procure replacement compute, or take other steps that would be rational to take if their objective was to survive shutdown. So while the agents in the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident were rogue, they were not truly sovereign.

  On the Loosehyperdimensional.co

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Certainty about God is eroding at the same rate on the left and the right, and only the starting level differs.

  Their words

  the drop in certain belief is the same size for both liberals and conservatives. It’s 15 percentage points when comparing the oldest respondents to the youngest.

  graphsaboutreligion.com

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You can now generate ten thousand variants of a function faster than you could write it once, and that economics pushes software towards replacement rather than repair.

  Their words

  I mean, if you if you think about it, you could generate 10,000 variants of a function faster than you could write it once.

  youtube.com

Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

From one piece How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industry 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Companies protected by high switching costs will see those costs fall to zero, and their profits with them.

  Their words

  Okay. So now we have people who've been able to rely on switching costs to protect their profits and the switching costs just drop to zero. Their profits are going to drop to zero and and some people aren't going to survive that change.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  People who vibe-code a replacement for a product will rebuild the visible tip of the iceberg and then discover the downstream problems they never knew existed.

  Their words

  So, we're going to see people get into those where they're like, "Well, I vibe code the tip of the iceberg. I throw away the rest of the iceberg and now I'm in trouble because now I don't know what to do. Now I get to these downstream problems that I didn't even know existed." So, we're going to see on the on the side of the the the vibe coding replacers, we're going to see that kind of a naivity play out.

  youtube.com

Independent iOS developer and podcaster; co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast and Analog(ue), and makes the apps Callsheet, MaskerAid and Peek-a-View.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Tower

  Their words

  I do most of my work in git using Tower, but will occasionally drop into the command line as well.

  usesthis.com

Full-stack Laravel developer based in Madison, Wisconsin; maintains open-source Laravel, Livewire and Alpine.js packages and writes at randallwilk.dev.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Raycast

  Their words

  I've never liked Spotlight on macOS, and previously I used Alfred as a replacement. However, now I've discovered Raycast. Raycast is my primary mode of navigating through macOS, as I've bound the keyboard shortcut to

  randallwilk.dev

Economist at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute; works on what advanced AI would do to growth, saving and the long-run economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The capital stock can grow quickly while the capital share falls, because the price of capital goods relative to consumption goods can drop faster still.

  Their words

  the capital stock could grow quickly, but the price of capital goods relative to consumption goods could be falling faster than the capital stock is growing.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rust's least mature area is the front end: write the backend in Rust and the front end in TypeScript rather than shipping Rust to the browser through WebAssembly.

  TypeScript

  Their words

  My opinion is that the least mature area is front end. There have been some attempts to compile Rust to Web Assembly and then run it on the web as a front end as a replacement for TypeScript. But if I was writing a web server, I would totally use Rust for the back end and TypeScript for the front end. I would not really go the web assembly route.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Claude

  Their words

  But Claude isn’t just a replacement-level SwiftUI developer. Claude is actually good.

  sockpuppet.org

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The accepted model of how archaic and modern humans relate has been accreted and patched rather than built, and is due for a simpler replacement.

  Their words

  I think that, you know, the model that we've put together collectively about the relationships between archaic and modern humans is sort of accreted over time. There was this, you know, idea that modern humans are distinct and that Neanderthals and Denisovans are like sisters of each other. And then over time we developed and detected additional mixture events like this modern human into Neanderthal and then this other ones I didn't even talk about like super divergent lineage going into Denisovans and like all this other stuff.

  youtube.com

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hybrid human-plus-AI teams will dominate mathematics for a lot longer, and a full replacement would need breakthroughs beyond anything we now have.

  Their words

  I mean, I I I I do believe that that hybrid um human plus AIs will will dominate mathematics for a lot longer. It it's It will depend It will require some additional breakthroughs uh beyond what we already have.

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Agents can build about half a million lines before the codebase dissolves into a mess, and the next model will push that to a few million.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  But right now I think it's sitting somewhere between half million and five million lines of code, somewhere in there. Probably more on the half million side right now and with the next drop of an Anthropic model, we're probably going to see it jump up to a few million lines.

  From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A cancellation-reason drop-down measures list order rather than reasons: randomise the options and every one of them gets picked equally.

  Their words

  And I realized it was the first one on the list and I thought, huh, I wonder if people are just picking the first one. So then then we randomized the list so everyone saw a different order of the list and now all the items were picked equally

  youtube.com

Indonesian fullstack engineer, speaker and instructor; writes about JavaScript, SvelteKit and Linux tooling at kalwabed.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  eza

  Their words

  eza: a modern, maintained replacement for ls.

  kalwabed.com

Co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management; author of the Oaktree memos.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI may be a replacement for human cognition rather than a tool, which makes it different in kind from earlier technologies.

  Their words

  AI may not be a tool for mankind, but rather something of a replacement.

  Is It a Bubble?oaktreecapital.com

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cheap clean energy has broken the old trade-off between raising living standards and cutting environmental harm.

  energy

  Their words

  The rapid drop in renewable energy costs in the last decade (alongside huge improvements in battery technologies) has started to break this deadlock.

  sustainabilitybynumbers.com

Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Tron: Ares soundtrack

  Their words

  Tron: Ares soundtrack. Better than the movie. (A-)

  kottke.org

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Effective use of AI coding tools requires domain expertise: the tool should be used as an assistant, not as a replacement for the engineer.

  Their words

  This is intentional and I believe good AI drivers are experts in their domains and utilize AI as an assistant, not a replacement.

  Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Featuremitchellh.com

Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  As AI lowers the barrier to building software, personal taste becomes a more valuable differentiator.

  Their words

  But along with the question of what you're willing to maintain, as the barriers to creation drop the value of taste will only increase.

  The Past and Future of Vibe Codingnateliason.com

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI systems are not yet a substitute for real, diverse human experts.

  Their words

  But they can't do everything that megapapers do, such as conveying intellectual heft and legitimacy, and they are not yet a replacement for real, diverse experts.

  Megapapers and How to Write Themmilesbrundage.substack.com

Founder of the International Center for Clinical Excellence and originator of Feedback-Informed Treatment. Writes about what actually makes a therapist effective, usually against the field's own assumptions about training and experience.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Therapists do not improve with experience: on average they become less effective, and their clients drop out more the longer they have practised.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  Indeed, as I've reported in previous posts, research not only shows therapists do not improve with time and experience in the field, but on average become less effective (1, 2, 3, 4).

  writings.scottdmiller.com

Investigative journalist; wrote Area 51, The Pentagon's Brain and Nuclear War: A Scenario, reconstructing what secret programmes actually did from interviews and declassified records.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Atomic weapons destroy cities and thermonuclear weapons destroy civilizations, which makes the decision to build the thermonuclear bomb more confounding than the decision to drop the first two.

  Their words

  I mean even projects within the Manhattan Project defined thermonuclear weapon, the thermonuclear weapon as the evil thing. It was evil. It’s a weapon of genocide. Atomic weapons destroy cities, thermonuclear weapons destroy civilizations.

  youtube.com

Writes Useful Fictions on agency and how to get better at things; a former appellate lawyer and the top-ranked woman in professional poker in 2017.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A drop in agency is the earliest sign of burnout, arriving before you consciously notice you are burning out.

  Their words

  Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realize what’s happening.

  How to be more agenticusefulfictions.substack.com

American front-end engineer and design-systems specialist; built the Pantsuit design system for Hillary for America and has worked at Slack and IBM.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  exa

  Their words

  exa - modern replacement for ls

  mina.codes

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Without immigrants Spain’s labour force falls from 22.6 to 15.7 million by 2050, far too few to run its economy.

  immigration

  Their words

  In the absence of immigrants, between 2020 and 2050 Spain’s labor force (its active population) will drop from 22.6 to 15.7 million people. You’re not going to fill all the jobs needed in a modern and sophisticated economy like that of Spain’s with 15.7 million people.

  english.elpais.com

Political scientist at the University of Chicago and the leading exponent of offensive realism; wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Removing Putin would not end the war, because whoever replaced him would be more hawkish than he is.

  Russia

  Their words

  My second point is if he doesn't remain in power and he's replaced, I would bet a lot of money that his replacement will be more hawkish and more hard line than Putin is.

  youtube.com

Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The collapse postulate cannot simply be discarded without replacement instructions for measurements.

  Their words

  As we just saw, one cannot just discard the Collapse Postulate. For this reason, if one does calculations in any Many Worlds approach, one must effectively replace the Collapse Postulate by other assumptions, notably about what happens to observers and/or measurement devices when worlds branch.

  Quantum Confusions, Cleared Up (or so I hope)arxiv.org

Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Sovereign debt markets can suffer sudden stops in investor demand even without material changes in economic fundamentals.

  Their words

  Sovereign debt markets (and many other markets as well) are subject to sudden stops in which investors either drop out or ask for large spreads even in the absence of large changes in fundamentals.

  Fiscal Policy under Low Interest Ratesdirect.mit.edu

Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  VS Code

  Their words

  Every now and again I go searching for a replacement IDE. VSCode came closer than anything else in the last two decades to replacing Vim, but somehow I am back here.

  usesthis.com

Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A few hundred dollars a month is nothing to a company and transformative to a project, so engineers should be the ones asking their employers to pay it.

  open source

  Their words

  A $250/mo recurring donation to would be a drop in the bucket of most businesses, but a major boon to any open source project, with which the business will almost certainly see tangible value-add as a result.

  The Commons Clause will destroy open sourcedrewdevault.com

Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Understand

  Their words

  “Understand” by Ted Chiang is a brilliant revisit of “Flowers for Algernon.” Drop everything and read it.

  x.com

London-based front-end architect, web developer evangelist and cloud consultant; Microsoft MVP. Writes at praveen.science and answers on Stack Overflow.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  iTerm2

  Their words

  iTerm 2 (macOS Specific) is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm.

  blog.praveen.science