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Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

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  Teaching that reflects political commitments is a legitimate part of intellectual diversity, not a violation of academic norms

  Their words

  There is nothing wrong with promoting perspectives that have political commitments; in fact, intellectual diversity requires this, because some viewpoints include political commitments.

  danieldrezner.substack.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  Software is product management, and those are the skills the agentic era rewards — skills that are not evenly distributed among programmers.

  Their words

  The reason I say that is there's a lot of programmers who are not very good product managers. Software is product management. What should it do? Who should it do it for? How should it do it? How should it look? What are our priorities? What do we start with first? What does version one include? All of those skills are not easily or equally distributed across all programmers.

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Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.

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  Keeping a social network, staying curious and having a sense of purpose protect against dementia about as much as blood pressure and exercise do.

  Their words

  Those include that having that sense of purpose, making sure that you have a network of people, that you're socially connected as your age, and also remaining curious, open to new ideas. Those factors turn out to be almost as important as some of the physical things we do.

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Front-end developer and writer; co-founder of CodePen, founder of CSS-Tricks, and co-host of the ShopTalk Show podcast.

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  Any coding tool released in 2026 should include AI capabilities.

  Their words

  AI is conspicuously missing from our 2.0 release, for sure. A 2026 coding tool should have AI tools.

  Clips from Hacker News Threadchriscoyier.net

Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

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  The least verifiable part of AI research is the judgement call about what goes into the one big training run.

  Their words

  Like the thing that I think is most likely to be sort of the bottleneck in terms of like the AI are really good at verifiable domains but not not at doing the actual thing is just like big experiments. You only get a few tries um well a few is maybe a bit understated but like basically like historically R&D has been driven by doing near frontier scale experiments and that has been pretty important and like actually doing the one big training run where you decide exactly what to include in that.

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

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  The internet is already past peak truth, and picking out training data worth learning from will only get harder.

  Their words

  I mean, you could argue that we we're already past peak truth on the on the on the internet, right? And now there's there's just more and more garbage every every day. It gets harder and harder to suss out the stuff that you do want to include in the training set in order to actually make something more intelligent.

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Coffee consultant and author of books on espresso, roasting and brewing, including The Professional Barista's Handbook and The Coffee Roaster's Companion; writes about brewing gear and roast control at scottrao.com.

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  Poorly aligned grinder burrs are far more common than the coffee community acknowledges.

  Their words

  If a burr set is poorly aligned, which is much more common than is discussed, the grounds will include more fines and more boulders.

  How to choose a grind settingscottrao.com

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.

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  Amp

  Their words

  My daily drivers now include Amp, Cursor, and Claude Code. I still enjoy notebooks, but only for data analysis, machine learning, or other exploratory workflows where the iterative, visual nature of notebooks shines.

  hamel.dev

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  Claude Code

  Their words

  My daily drivers now include Amp, Cursor, and Claude Code. I still enjoy notebooks, but only for data analysis, machine learning, or other exploratory workflows where the iterative, visual nature of notebooks shines.

  hamel.dev

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  Cursor

  Their words

  My daily drivers now include Amp, Cursor, and Claude Code. I still enjoy notebooks, but only for data analysis, machine learning, or other exploratory workflows where the iterative, visual nature of notebooks shines.

  hamel.dev

American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.

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  Moana

  Their words

  And in fact, I do like Moana very much. It’s my favorite film out of Disney Animated Studios in the last decade, and even (barely) edges out Coco when you include Pixar in the mix

  whatever.scalzi.com

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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  Pedro Páramo

  Their words

  Some excellent short novels that fit this include Juan Rulfo's haunted and brilliant Pedro Páramo

  countercraft.substack.com

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  Exercises in Style

  Their words

  Oulipo's co-founder Raymond Queneau has a book to include here called Exercises in Style (trans. by Barbara Wright), which retells an intentionally banal story 99 times.

  countercraft.substack.com

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  Invisible Cities

  Their words

  I'm going to have to include Italo Calvino's Oulipian novel Invisible Cities (trans. by William Weaver), since it is a foundational text for me.

  countercraft.substack.com

Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.

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  The water-use objection to AI does not survive arithmetic: skipping one burger a month covers a person's token footprint, and golf uses more water than every data centre together.

  data centersAmerica

  Their words

  So AI consumes approximately 0.04% of America’s freshwater if you include onsite and offsite use, and only 0.008% if you include just the water in data centers.

  The AI water issue is fakeblog.andymasley.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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  Decentralisation does not explain why Spain builds subways cheaply and Britain does not: the cheap countries include Europe's most centralised ones.

  Europe

  Their words

  In truth, the UK shares high costs with more decentralized countries, and Spain shares low ones with more centralized ones.

  Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralizationpedestrianobservations.com

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

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  The Systems Bible

  Their words

  Does part of your work include designing, architecting, building, or thinking about how systems work? This book is a snarky look at all the reasons systems fail. The author has clearly lived a life in systems design and has no qualms about calling out all the obvious and not so obvious reasons an complex or complicated system struggles. My main qualm was it offered few solutions while pointing out problems.

  jasonevanish.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

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  An Introduction to Thermal Physics

  Their words

  Despite my aim to keep this list purely about math books, I cannot help but include this one in the list. Simply put, it's one of the most enjoyable textbooks I've ever read, giving a very satisfying first-principles understanding of what thermodynamic concepts like temperature and entropy really are, and how we can to understand them.

  3blue1brown.com

Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

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  Western firms that kept the high-value work at home are betting the workforce they trained cannot absorb the technology, and that bet has already lost several times.

  Their words

  That bet has failed at least in technologies that include high-speed rail, shipbuilding, and telecommunications equipment.

  2019 letterdanwang.co

Cartoonist and comics theorist, author of Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, Making Comics and the graphic novel The Sculptor.

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  Spotify

  Their words

  Other frequently used programs include Dreamweaver and Fetch for my site; Chrome, iPhoto and Preview for reference hunting; iTunes, Spotify, and Downcast to keep me company.

  usesthis.com

Co-founder and chief strategy officer of Intercom; writes and speaks about product strategy, customer support and, lately, what AI does to both.

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  Whether a feature is quick to build is a roadmap question, never a reason on its own to build it.

  Their words

  The main problem with this argument is that the scope of work should never be a reason to include a feature in a product.

  Product strategy means saying nointercom.com

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

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  knitr

  Their words

  I use my knitr package to generate reports directly from code (literate programming); the "reports" may include homework, blog posts, websites, papers and books.

  usesthis.com