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Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The specific rules taught as clean code are simply bad programming practices, and they get worse when you apply them together.

  Their words

  If you look at those things, they're kind of just bad programming practices. I I don't really know how else to say them. They don't mesh well when you put them together.

  youtube.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Intelligence looks like a fact of physics: apply enough compute to matter and you get something that thinks.

  Their words

  I mean it feels like a lot of physics. Like if you apply enough compute to matter, you get this thing that looks like intelligence.

  youtube.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Elements of Style

  Their words

  I wish everybody read this book. The surprising thing is that many aspects and recommendations apply to virtually any language, not specifically English.

  rakhim.org

• Readrcmnd.app

  The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success

  Their words

  It’s… okay.

  rakhim.org

Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Today’s models are already powerful enough to add many points of GDP growth; what is missing is people with the vision and ambition to apply them.

  ambition

  Their words

  I truly believe these these models are already just incredibly powerful. Like they should they should be so powerful to fuel, you know, um many many points of expansion of GDP growth and I think it's like up to smart people with vision and ambition to make all that happen.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Programs exist to communicate intent to other people and now to models as well, and we do not understand at all how to communicate effectively to models.

  Their words

  part of the goal of programs is to communicate intent to other human beings and now to models as well which which is a much more open-ended problem. We understand a lot more about how to communicate to other human beings whether we apply that understanding or not. We don't understand at all how to communicate effectively to models

  youtube.com

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most social and political divides come from different views on how to apply shared values, not from opposing values themselves.

  Their words

  Most of our divides aren't due to opposing values. They're due to different views on how to live similar values.

  Silence Is Not Necessarily Violenceadamgrant.substack.com

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Science always bottlenecks precisely where the heuristics that worked before stop applying, which is definitionally what makes something a bottleneck.

  Their words

  the point is that where we always get bottlenecked is where the the previous processes and and and heuristics don't apply. Right? Like that's almost sort of definitionally what causes the bottlenecks.

  youtube.com

Researcher on developer productivity; co-wrote Accelerate and the DORA research, and created the SPACE framework.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Delivery will keep being slow until companies apply AI to the human, business-process half of it, not just to coding.

  Their words

  a lot of companies haven't started until now thinking about how we could apply AI to the very human, very business process part of it. And so, that will keep slowing us down until we find a way to to address it, right?

  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

  On any given problem an AI tool succeeds maybe one or two percent of the time; the headline results are what running it at scale and picking the winners looks like.

  Their words

  Uh but whenever we do a systematic study, um any given problem, an AI tool has a success rate of maybe 1 or 2%. Uh it's just that it's just that they can apply at scale and and you just pick the winners, it looks great.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Until, a reversible-cryopreservation company, and previously the founder of the Longevity Fund.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Temperature is a rare conceptual lever that lets you use physics to reason usefully about a biological problem.

  Their words

  Basically what that gives you is like you can apply a lot of theoretical sort of um a lot of theoretical toolkit used in physics to model parts of this question in ways that are actually useful. And it is just not true that you can use like equations from physics to think usefully about almost any other problem in biology.

  youtube.com

Programmer and writer; co-wrote The Rust Programming Language and worked on Rust's documentation for years.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Claude

  Their words

  I’m going to be speaking about Claude directly, because it’s the tool I use the most, but a lot of this should apply to other platforms as well.

  steveklabnik.com

Programmer and designer who writes at tonsky.me; author of Fira Code, DataScript and AnyBar.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Human-interface design principles from decades ago remain valid because human cognition hasn't changed.

  Their words

  But the principles-as long as they are good principles-still apply, because they are based on how humans work, not how computers work.

  It’s hard to justify Tahoe iconstonsky.me

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The bitter lesson is only an empirical observation about a particular seventy years of history, and need not hold for the next seventy.

  Their words

  The bitter lesson. Oh, who cares about that? That's that's an empirical observation about a particular period in history. 70 years in history no longer doesn't necessarily have to apply the next 70 years.

  youtube.com

FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Working with the entire ecosystem produces better long-term results than focusing solely on your own organization's immediate needs.

  Their words

  While the same does not directly apply in other fields, working with others to produce the best results for everyone will be much better in the long-term than focusing solely on what Amazon needs right now.

  Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadershipdaemonology.net

Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Research taste, the harder-to-learn conceptual skills behind good research strategy, takes a long time to develop but very little time to apply once acquired

  Their words

  My model is that research requires a mix of skills. The day-to-day coding and execution is crucial. But there's also a set of harder-to-learn conceptual skills, collectively called research taste. These skills take a long time to gain because they have poor feedback loops, but they take very little time to use.

  MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29)neelnanda.io

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Kids have their own lives and parents should not try to apply their rules to them.

  Their words

  But it's a great reminder that our kids have their own life, that we should not try to apply our rules to them.

  sive.rs

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Apple's 30% cut is a junk fee on commerce done with a phone the customer already paid for, and it has shut down the competitive engine that once fuelled the software economy.

  Their words

  You already bought that phone, why should Apple be adding a 30% junk fee to all commerce you do, and why do they selectively apply it to some things and not others? I've always viewed this as deeply abusive and that it shuts down the competitive engine that once fueled the app and software economy.

  youtube.com

Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The journey is better than the destination is a shallow phrase: taken literally it says every place you are heading from now on is worse.

  Their words

  The journey is better than the destination. Everyone's heard this. Just take one second to apply what that means. That means forever starting from now, you are only going towards a place that's worse.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The copyright problem in AI training already has a legal solution nobody is taking: train the models in Japan, where copyright does not apply to training data.

  energy

  Their words

  So, Japan has a law which you're allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don't apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they'd like.

  youtube.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The memorize-fetch-apply paradigm behind LLMs can reach arbitrary skill given training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or acquire new skills on the fly.

  LLMsOpenAI

  Their words, before

  This "memorize, fetch, apply" paradigm can achieve arbitrary levels of skills at arbitrary tasks given appropriate training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or pick up new skills on the fly (which is to say that there is no fluid intelligence at play here.)

  Their words now

  OpenAI's new o3 model represents a significant leap forward in AI's ability to adapt to novel tasks. This is not merely incremental improvement, but a genuine breakthrough, marking a qualitative shift in AI capabilities compared to the prior limitations of LLMs.

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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries

  Their words

  An eye-opening view on considerations going into building a widely used public API or reusable library. While the book focuses on the .NET framework, many of the conventions apply to maintainable and reusable components, in general. This book had an outsized impact on me as I read it when I was a mid-level .NET developer.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI answer engine; previously a research scientist at OpenAI and a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Real reasoning will have arrived when spending more compute at inference time reliably buys a dramatically better answer.

  Their words

  I think if we can achieve that amount of inference compute, where it leads to a dramatically better answer as you apply more inference compute, I think that will be the beginning of real reasoning breakthroughs.

  youtube.com

CEO of Redwood Research, where he works on AI control: making sure a powerful model cannot cause a catastrophe even if it is misaligned and trying to.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Labs should make powerful models safe to deploy even if those models are misaligned and actively trying to subvert the safeguards.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  That is, labs should make sure that the safety measures they apply to their powerful models prevent unacceptably bad outcomes, even if the AIs are misaligned and intentionally try to subvert those safety measures.

  redwoodresearch.substack.com

Semiconductor analyst; writes Fabricated Knowledge on the chip industry and the companies in it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Moore's Law is a fractal: the same squeeze that shrank the transistor is now being applied to the rack.

  Their words

  Moore’s Law is a fractal, and the principles that apply to nanometers apply to racks.

  fabricatedknowledge.com

Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Leaving an old relationship for a new one is usually shopping for novelty rather than refusing to honour a sunk cost.

  Their words

  a new relationship is like fresh powder. It is new and shiny and exciting but it will not be a new relationship for long. And then you're still stuck with an old relationship and the question is will your old relationship a year from now be better than your old relationship that you currently have is? And if the answer is yes then yes sunk costs completely apply. But if the answer is no then what you're really doing is shopping for novelty not ignoring sunk costs.

  youtube.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

  Arc Browser

  Their words

  I recently switched to Arc Browser, so some of these no longer apply.

  mina.codes

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Finite and Infinite Games

  Their words

  So abstract. Maybe the most abstract book you’ll ever read. Compares “finite” games with rules and winners, versus “infinite” games without winners where we can play with the game itself. Is it about a job versus a calling? Religion versus spirituality? A story versus story-telling? Who knows. Thought-provoking if you can apply the metaphor to whatever concerns you.

  sive.rs

Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The single test to apply to any technology is whether it centralises power or decentralises it: the first is bad and the second is good.

  Their words

  my central thesis about the world is there’s things that centralize power, and they’re bad. There’s things that decentralize power, and they’re good. Everything I can do to help decentralize power, I’d like to do.

  youtube.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Even when advice is understood and believed, people discount it by assuming their own case is the exception.

  Their words

  Even when we understand the words, and even when we trust them, we still have another eject button: we assume they don’t apply to us.

  You can't reach the brain through the earsexperimental-history.com

Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Breaking through a skill plateau requires unlearning beliefs and conventions that are wrong or narrower than assumed.

  Their words

  people get up to a certain level of performance, and then they start to stagnate. And they start to plateau. And people who who break through and move to the next level um are the ones who have to who engage in unlearning. Who realize there are certain uh conventions they've bought into or beliefs they hold that are either wrong or are limited and and don't apply as broadly as as they imagine.

  youtube.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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  Own the Room: Business Presentations that Persuade, Engage, and Get Results

  Their words

  If you want one book to teach you everything you need to know about giving great presentations, this is the book. A film director, a psychologist, and an actor share their combined experiences to help improve your content, the design, your movements, and just about every other detail of being a great speaker. It was a slow start, but by the end, I had dog-eared dozens of pages and marked up many more which I was able to directly apply to a major talk I was working on.

  jasonevanish.com

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  The Creative Habit

  Their words

  This is a great book for understanding how the creative process works. It left me with a lot of ideas I could apply to my day to day to be more creative. After living in the world of startups and business in real life and most of the books I read, it was great to hear how the different world of dance performance can be learned from.

  jasonevanish.com

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  Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google

  Their words

  If you're curious how Google built it's culture and the processes thanks to their extremely data & engineering driven nature, this is a great book. What held it back was being ~100 pages too long and Bock didn't always understand where what they did only fit at a $100Bn+, mega-profitable company. Still, the insights on the studies on their 50,000+ employees is well worth the read since so few of us can get similar statistical significance to apply to our teams.

  jasonevanish.com

+ 2 more

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  The Lean Entrepreneur

  Their words

  It goes much further and deeper into how to approach actually doing Lean in your business than Eric Ries's The Lean Startup book. It also has some awesome case studies showing how lean can apply to any industry. See my full review here.

  jasonevanish.com

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  Obviously Awesome

  Their words

  Simple, practical, useful. This book is a quick read that covers modern positioning and how to do it. Unlike all the theoretical books out there, this is a VC who lived a life as a marketer (all the way up to CMO/VP) doing this and then worked with more entrepreneurs. This hands on experience leads to a system that is easy to understand and apply. I'm now trying to apply it so this score will rise or fall based on the results we have.

  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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  Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms: A Unified Approach

  Their words

  This is what I wish I learned from in my freshman year of college. The part of it about linear algebra is one of the best linear algebra resources out there, and remainder shows you how those tools apply to non-linear mathematics.

  3blue1brown.com