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Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

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  Even after decades of AI-driven progress, most people's daily material lives will look largely unchanged.

  America

  Their words

  It feels very likely in 50 years that the average American's day to day life looks very similar.

  When will average people feel AI’s impact?interconnects.ai

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Internet points that convert into CV and promotion material are far more valuable than spending them on a quick dunk.

  Their words

  Scoring internet points that can be converted into CV line items and promotion package paragraphs is vastly better than squandering it all for a quick dunk.

  @dhh on Xx.com

Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.

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  Countering the far right requires addressing voters' desire for an outsider identity, not just their economic grievances.

  Their words

  To my mind, if progressive policy hopes to engage with such voters at all - and it is open question whether it should - it must address not just the material realities of relative economic disadvantage, but above all the "outsider" credentials of the AfD.

  adamtooze.substack.com

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

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  A language model asked to summarize its own system prompt risks that prompt's content biasing the summary it produces.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  I don’t trust Claude to summarize its own system prompts when there’s a risk that material from its system prompt might impact its opinions.

  simonwillison.net

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The teachers people remember changed them by removing a belief that they could not do something, not by teaching the material well.

  Their words

  the best teacher you had, like everybody remembers the one or two teachers who changed their life. It wasn't because they marked up your paper really well. That wasn't what did it for them. It was because you had some block. They saw you and they convinced you you could do so much more.

  youtube.com

US science and technology adviser to the president, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; previously US chief technology officer and chief operating officer of Scale AI.

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  AI will transform how scientific discovery is done, and within two or three years a working scientist's job will already look dramatically different.

  Their words

  If you are working on material science, if you are working on pharmaceuticals, if you are working on chemistry, you in 2 3 years or even today are doing your role as a scientist dramatically different because of artificial intelligence.

  youtube.com

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

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  Coding is not just another application domain for AI; it is the meta-skill that lets AI generate its own training material and start the recursive self-improvement loop.

  Their words

  Coding isn't yet another application domain -- it's the meta-skill required for AI to automatically develop its own training material, via symbolic world models. That's how the RSI loop actually kicks off.

  @fchollet on Xx.com

Short-story writer and novelist; won the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and teaches craft weekly in Story Club.

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  A first draft should not be graded good or bad; it is only the material that taste then gets to act on.

  Their words

  Just don’t do it. Accept it, whatever it is, as a starting place in the long game of exerting your taste on your own prose.

  On the Perils of Self-Assessing...georgesaunders.substack.com

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

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  The fear that a big lab will simply build your product is overstated, because no organisation can aggressively prosecute a hundred priorities at once.

  Google

  Their words

  And just human organizations are complicated and it's very hard to have um to manage to aggressively prosecute 100 different priorities and to deal with all the issues and interference that arises among them and so forth. And so, you know, Google has done incredibly well in a bunch of specific places, but it's not like Google has done all the things even if in some kind of basic material sense, uh Google maybe, you know, had that ability.

  youtube.com

Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A narrow, highly accurate model can beat a general one inside its own domain, as AlphaFold did, and materials science and chip design are next.

  Their words

  I mean I think like if you look at uh my colleagues work on say alpha fold that was a very specific model for uh protein folding and it was highly successful um and was able to really handle that domain quite well so that all of a sudden you now have this amazing tool and model that can give you answers to questions about proteins and their structure um really effectively um but it's not a general model it's a very specific one and there are other I domains where that kind of approach can work really well. Uh maybe in material science or chip design or things like that that uh will enable you to leverage the capabilities of a very accurate but but niche model uh to do things that are hard today.

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

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

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  Software is the only field of human labour with practitioner conferences and freely shared knowledge; every other field has only academic conferences and trade shows.

  open source

  Their words

  Software is kind of unique in having the third kind of the practitioner conference where we are just meeting to get better at what we do. We also are really the only kind to really focus heavily on like open source in making our knowledge freely available.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

From one piece Comprehensible Input: How It Helps Language Learning 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  A beginner cannot learn from material made for native speakers: at the start, authentic media is noise.

  Their words

  If you are starting a language completely from scratch, authentic media is just noise. You’ll absorb very little. You need highly repetitive, simple input.

  blog.thelinguist.com

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  Past the beginning, learn from whatever you actually care about rather than from material written for learners.

  Their words

  Don’t limit yourself to material designed for language learners. Read and listen to content that you genuinely care about.

  blog.thelinguist.com

Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.

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  Efficiency is the wrong measure of a food system; what matters is what it costs at a level of energy and materials that can be sustained.

  energy

  Their words

  a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput.

  chrissmaje.com

Chief executive of Intel since 2025, founder of the venture firm Walden International and chief executive of Cadence Design Systems for thirteen years.

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  Performance can still double, but cost and area will no longer come down with it unless new materials or new design methods arrive.

  Their words

  and then the power and the cost and then you can double the performance but you cannot double down on the cost and and area. So those are the thing you have to give give way unless you find some new way of material new way of design.

  youtube.com

Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.

From one piece Why Anthropic’s ultra-dirty deal shouldn’t surprise you at all 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Anthropic does not meaningfully prioritize climate, environmental, or air pollution concerns despite its public image.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  It was already clear a while ago that Anthropic mostly do not care about climate, environment or air pollution in any material way, even if they care a little bit more about bad PR than Elon Musk does.

  ketanjoshi.co

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  Panic and impatience in the industry, not the technology itself, are what drive the worst environmental harms of the data centre boom.

  data centers

  Their words

  The fundamental drivers of this change are panic and impatience, and that is what is behind the worst impacts of data centre growth, including a material risk to decarbonisation and climate action.

  ketanjoshi.co

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

  A sustained 'do nothing' meditation practice surfaces unresolved psychological material in an order the practitioner cannot control.

  Their words

  Nothing practice is psychologically thorough: all of your stuff will come up, in an order not determined by you.

  sashachapin.substack.com

American budget-travel writer who publishes as Nomadic Matt. Author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day; runs nomadicmatt.com, a long-running site of destination guides, packing advice and gear recommendations.

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  Unbound Merino

  Their words

  I really love the material, they're comfortable, they hardly ever need a wash, and they last forever!

  nomadicmatt.com

French software engineer, public speaker and fully remote nomadic worker; writes about frontend development at maxpou.fr.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Material Theme

  Their words

  The theme I use is Material Theme which I customized.

  maxpou.fr

Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.

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  Good Material

  Their words

  Good Material by Dolly Alderton A simple story about a struggling stand-up comedian going through a difficult break-up. A funny, sweet book. I enjoyed it.

  awealthofcommonsense.com

American author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Undoing Project, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Until you know how a story ends you cannot know how it begins, and that is why a book with material but no shape cannot be written.

  Their words

  I just don't know where this is going. I don't know what the end is. When I don't know what the end is, I don't know what the beginning is. And it's that simple.

  10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)youtube.com

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

From one piece Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations, Noah’s Ark, and Flood Myths | Lex Fridman Podcast #487 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Indus Valley people must have written on perishable material; carved stone seals cannot have been all the writing they had.

  Their words

  And it’s obvious, it’s obvious that they had writing on a perishable material. They can’t just have had inscribed stone seals, and many parts of India today write on palm leaf.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Our picture of the Sumerians is skewed by the accident of what was dug up, and the people working with skewed material do not realise how skewed it is.

  Their words

  So our view of it is skewed by the nature of the material, and sometimes the material is opulent and benevolent, but not always, and sometimes the people who work with skewed material don’t even realize how skewed it is.

  youtube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Brewing coffee with too deep a bed forces a coarser grind, which lowers extraction efficiency and wastes coffee grounds.

  Their words

  If a bed is too deep, one has to use a very coarse grind. The result in the cup may or may not be good enough, but the extraction level will be low, which is inefficient, in the sense of wasting coffee material.

  Bed depth: why it mattersscottrao.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

Designer and co-founder of Lux, makers of Halide, Spectre and Kino; formerly a designer at Apple.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Interfaces are returning to skeuomorphism, but as behaviour rather than lacquer: clear, graphic elements that act like materials from the real world.

  Their words

  We’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality.

  Physicality: the new age of UIlux.camera

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good storytelling doesn't require inventing something entirely new; it can be built from existing material.

  Their words

  One myth of good storytelling is that it requires dreaming up something entirely new from scratch. That's not necessary.

  Storytelling for Product Leadersbringthedonuts.com

Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading.

  Their words

  What is out there is buried among ever-growing piles of useless content farm material or, increasingly, AI-generated garbage.

  Fighting for our webcitationneeded.news

Founder and editor of Techdirt; coined the Streisand effect, and writes on platform liability, speech law and copyright.

From one piece Durov’s Arrest Details Released, Leaving More Questions Than Answers 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Complicity is a dangerous legal standard for platforms, because every platform hosts some illegal material and stopping it entirely is impossible.

  Their words

  The list of “complicity” in various bad things worries me because every platform has some element of that kind of content going on, in part because it’s impossible to stop entirely.

  techdirt.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Telegram reports no child sexual abuse material at all to the clearing house that handles it, and that is indefensible even if no law compels a non-US company to.

  Their words

  I know from the report that Stanford put out earlier this year that Telegram does not report CSAM to NCMEC at all. That is very stupid. I would imagine Telegram would argue that as a non-US company it doesn’t have to abide by such laws.

  techdirt.com

Egyptian front-end developer and course creator; writes for CSS-Tricks, publishes courses on Udemy and blogs at alialaa.dev.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Postman

  Their words

  I use MAMP for WordPress development, Postman for API testing, Notion for notes and task management, Slack and Discord for communication and Keynote for course presentations.

  alialaa.dev

Neuroscientist at UC Davis; studies memory and wrote Why We Remember.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Forgetting names is not a defect of memory: a name is an arbitrary label with nothing to attach it to, and arbitrary material is exactly what brains are worst at.

  Their words

  For the most part, it’s like these names are just utterly arbitrary, so you have no thing to latch on to. It’s not really a thing that our brain does very well to learn meaningless, arbitrary stuff. So what you need to do is build connections somehow, visualize a connection, and sometimes it’s obvious or sometimes it’s not.

  youtube.com

German web developer, writer and conference speaker. Publishes the Web Weekly newsletter and blogs about the web platform at stefanjudis.com.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Keynote

  Their words

  I use it for presentations, graphic tasks and animations. I love this piece of software.

  stefanjudis.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A state's power rests on two material foundations only: the size of its population and its wealth.

  Their words

  The two key building blocks of power are population size and wealth. You want to have a lot of people and you want to be really wealthy.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Argues at length for building things, mostly in short form.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is no material problem, whether created by nature or by technology, that cannot be solved with more technology.

  Their words

  We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.

  The Techno-Optimist Manifestoa16z.com

Designer, architect and scientist, who led the Mediated Matter group at MIT and founded OXMAN, a company that builds products in collaboration with living organisms.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Living systems can be laid out on two axes, material sophistication and communication, and an organism that excels on one is usually poor on the other.

  Their words

  So if you think about entire all of nature, let's say all of living systems as a matrix that runs across two axes one is material sophistication, which is terribly relevant for designers, and the other is communication. The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap.

  youtube.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  Star Kingdom

  Their words

  Buroker is a reliable author of very fluffy mind candy, either science fiction or fantasy. A lot of her output is re-working material from identifiable prior art, without hewing so closely to the canon as to constitute fan fiction.

  bactra.org

Writer of the personal-finance blog Of Dollars And Data and author of Just Keep Buying and The Wealth Ladder. Chief Operating Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management.

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  The Great Depression: A Diary

  Their words

  This fantastic work is a primary source material to one of the darkest times in American economic history.

  ofdollarsanddata.com

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