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Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reclassifying a vaccine out of official routine-recommendation status erodes practical access to it even without changing the recommendation itself.

  Their words

  Moving a vaccine out of that category adds significant implementation barriers that will erode access to vaccines.

  yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Mass AI-written outreach fails on its own terms: playing the same numbers game as everyone else adds to the noise you then drown in.

  Their words

  Don't expect a response to an AI-written email, or a templated email. I get it, you think it's a numbers game: send a tweaked email out to 100 podcasts, and hope that at least one replies. In reality, by playing the same game as everyone else does, you are assisting to the noise, and end up drowning yourself in it as well.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Gear reviewer who publishes long-form hi-fi audio and camera equipment reviews, plus video reviews, at stevehuffphoto.com.

From one piece After 40 Years in HiFi…THIS is what MATTERS MOST! 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The source component (streamer or DAC) affects a system's sound more than the amplifier does.

  Their words

  the source is so important and for me makes a much larger difference than an amp will bring.

  stevehuffphoto.com

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  The room/listening space matters more to sound quality than any speaker, amp, or source component.

  Their words

  There is no amp, speaker or source that can fix bad room acoustics so room is the #1 part of your system, period, end of story.

  stevehuffphoto.com

Engineering leader on Google Chrome; writes about web performance and, lately, about working with AI coding tools.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Very few developers understand memory management, and that is why the state of the art in memory debugging has barely moved in years.

  Their words

  I would say, sometimes, I don't know if it's controversial, that very few developers understand memory management. And that makes it even harder to debug memory problems. And so the state of the art around memory debugging hasn't evolved all that much over the years.

  youtube.com

Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.

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  Cold exposure trains autonomic regulation that generalises, so that an everyday provocation stops producing an anger response at all.

  Their words

  And I'm not claiming this as a published study, but so I think there's a there's a direct autonomic training component as well in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions that they can become kind of automatically regulated.

  youtube.com

Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.

From one piece Multifactorial trials: taking apart the kitchen sink 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  A trial that changes ten things at once cannot tell you which of them worked.

  Their words

  The one thing we absolutely cannot say, from a trial designed this way, is that any single component, on its own, lowered blood pressure.

  peterattiamd.com

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  Being part of a package that worked does not make a component causal, or even relevant.

  Their words

  Being included in a successful package does not make something causal.

  peterattiamd.com

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

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  Betting a robotics company on today's component prices is betting it on a number with a short shelf life.

  Their words

  So, betting your company, betting your approach on today's hardware prices is just betting your company on a number that has a fairly short shelf life and is going to expire.

  youtube.com

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A model is better thought of as a living creature with a personality you must get to know than as a component you specify.

  Their words

  And the model is not like that. It's um the way to think about it is almost like a like a living creature, like it's something more organic.

  Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code's Promptyoutube.com

Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Metformin is not a general-purpose anti-cancer or anti-ageing drug, and healthy people should not take it as one.

  Their words

  MAST adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that metformin is not a general-purpose anticancer drug.

  Metformin and cancer: active surveillance neededpeterattiamd.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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  CalDigit TS5+

  Their words

  I had a TS4 before it, and the TS5+ adds 10Gb ethernet, which is amazing when moving files on/off my network-attached storage.

  usesthis.com

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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  llama3.2:3b

  Their words

  Right now: llama3.2:3b appears to be the model for: is this email urgent?qwen3:8b appears to be the model for: summarize this 5000-word article. llama3.3:70b(q8) appears to be the model for: let’s write or debug some computer code.

  braddelong.substack.com

Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Answering every problem, competitor and user request with one more shipped feature does not add up to a good product; it adds up to a horrible one.

  Their words

  If you add that up, you think, "Oh, we shipped a thousand features. Now that adds it to a good product." It actually adds it to a horrible product.

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com

Danish software engineer and Microsoft technical fellow, creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi and lead architect of C# and TypeScript.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A programming language is not a compiler but an experience: editing, running, debugging and the runtime library all have to fit together as one cycle.

  Their words

  That was always the idea, and that that goes back even to the predecessor of Turbo Pascal, this idea that it's not just a compiler. It's an experience, right? I mean, you don't just compile your programs. You also edit them. You also run them. You also debug them. You also have a runtime library. It all has to like fit together.

  youtube.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Demand for open-source component libraries is collapsing, because a model will write exactly the widget you want instead of one you have to customise.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  Why would I use a date picker library where I'd have to customize it when I could have Claude write me the exact date picker that I want.

  youtube.com

Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The modern adherence to the electronic universe is disastrous for humans, and reduces the vitality of the human component.

  Their words

  Because I think that the modern adherence to the electronic universe is disastrous for humans, and because it reduces the vitality of the human component. I think it’s restrictive in a way that people don’t realize until it’s too late.

  youtube.com

Scottish software developer on the Statamic core team; runs a one-person business maintaining Statamic addons such as Runway and writes at duncanmcclean.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Ray

  Their words

  Ray lets me debug code without cluttering my app's output with dumps.

  duncanmcclean.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Sierra, chairman of the board of OpenAI, and formerly co-chief executive of Salesforce and chief technology officer of Facebook.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  When an AI writes bad code the thing to fix is the context it was given, not the code, because fixing the output adds no leverage.

  Their words

  if it produces incorrect code our philosophy is don't fix the code fix the context that cursor had that produced the bad code

  youtube.com

Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Monitoring tools that do periodic work can themselves cause the latency outliers they were installed to diagnose.

  Their words

  One performance anti-pattern is when a company, to debug one performance problem, installs a monitoring tool that periodically does work and causes application latency outliers.

  brendangregg.com

Energy and decarbonisation analyst; publishes an annual chart deck on the state of the transition, and was chief content officer at BloombergNEF.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solar power now adds more new capacity to the global grid each year than any technology ever has, and will soon lead in annual electricity added too.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.

  Traveler’s Talesnathanielbullard.com

Indian software engineer and co-founder of Skcript; builds web apps and writes at varunraj.in.

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  LG 34" Ultrawide Monitor - 34WK95C-B

  Their words

  My everyday office gear that helps me debug, code, write documents seamlessly.

  varunraj.in

Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Rest

  Their words

  A refreshing counterargument to our culture's obsession with busyness, showing how deliberate rest is an essential component of the good life.

  pathlesspath.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We cannot know how much safety a control measure buys until we understand elicitation, so control adds a margin of unknown size.

  Their words

  However, without having a good handle on elicitation, we cannot be confident that our control techniques are effective.

  Should we control AI instead of aligning it?aligned.substack.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

  Americans and their elected representatives will not vote for a universal benefit, because they believe help must be morally earned and therefore targeted.

  America

  Their words

  I think it's always going to be hard to pull off because I think Americans and their elected representatives don't want to provide a universal benefit. They want to provide a targeted benefit because they believe there's a moral component here.

  youtube.com

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every SETI search ever conducted adds up to sampling a hot tub's worth of an ocean, so finding nothing tells us nothing.

  Their words

  And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it

  youtube.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cooling adds nothing to what a data centre produces, which is why it is the first thing a good design deletes rather than optimises.

  data centersenergy

  Their words

  The cooling systems in most data centers are energy hogs and contribute no direct value.

  How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site

Environmental researcher; writes on land use, agriculture and whether decoupling human welfare from nature is possible.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Making American farms more productive shrinks cropland in the rest of the world by more than it adds at home.

  America

  Their words

  Nelson Villoria estimates that for every 1% gain in Total Factor Productivity (inputs required per unit of output) in the US, croplands in the rest of the world shrink by 0.7%.

  Raising Agricultural Yields Spares Landthebreakthrough.org

Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

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  James

  Their words

  Briefly, James is Huckleberry Finn retold from the perspective of Jim. It has all the energy and humor of Twain's work—in Everett's own unique voice of course—and adds a whole new level of depth to the story.

  countercraft.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  About a dozen holdings captures nearly all the benefit of diversification; going to fifty adds almost nothing.

  Their words

  I even recommend for individual investors to invest in a dozen companies, you don't get that much more benefit of diversification going from a dozen to 25 or even 50.

  youtube.com

Programmer and entrepreneur; co-founded GitHub and created Jekyll, Gravatar and the Semantic Versioning spec.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building a secure, performant GraphQL API is tricky and adds real cost during early-stage app prototyping.

  Their words

  While we love GraphQL for many use cases, implementing a secure and performant GraphQL API can be tricky and there is a definite cost to requiring it during early prototyping of your app.

  tom.preston-werner.com

Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Funding should pay for maintenance, not features, because every new feature adds to the burden the money was meant to relieve.

  Their words

  Finally, the health of the project depends on issue triage, bug fixes, refactors, and design work more than on new features. In fact, new features increase the maintenance burden.

  How to pay professional maintainerswords.filippo.io

Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Software's real advantage over physical engineering is consistency: a component does what it is specified to do every time, while physical materials only fall within a tolerance.

  Their words

  Software is far more consistent than any other kind of engineering.

  We Are Not Specialhillelwayne.com

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every mile of public-road testing adds risk, so each one has to earn its keep.

  Their words

  Even if you have the best possible safety drivers, every test mile adds some risk. Hopefully that risk is no worse than human driver vehicle risks, but that’s a different discussion.

  safeautonomy.blogspot.com

Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building automation that doesn't address the actual bottleneck to shipping adds noise rather than helping ship.

  Their words

  If what's holding you back from shipping is, say, getting more customer input, or a brittle release process, or flaky monitoring, or missing tests, then all the bot does is to add noise. It doesn't help you ship.

  But does it help you ship?thorstenball.com