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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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI scaling laws require exponentially more compute and resources to produce only linear gains in model intelligence.

  Their words

  all of our scaling laws show that you need exponential compute and resources to make linear improvements in intelligence.

  Why I still haven’t bought into true RSIinterconnects.ai

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI is becoming as fundamental to knowledge work as electricity was to industry.

  energyAmerica

  Their words

  For knowledge work, which is roughly half of the U.S. economy, AI is as fundamental as electricity (or quickly will be so, with rapid improvements to agents in the next 18 months).

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

Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  High-end knife steel upgrades have hit diminishing returns, needing far more resources for gains that aren't noticeable based on specs alone.

  Their words

  We are at a point metallurgically where video games were at the start of the last console generation-upgrades aren't necessarily noticeable based on specs alone. And noticeable improvements require a huge increase in resources.

  Spyderco SpyNano Revieweverydaycommentary.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A revised version of an established product is usually just different from the original, not actually better.

  Their words

  Many companies take a perfectly great speaker and every year or two release a "V2" with claims of big improvements. Usually it's just differences rather than being better.

  My Fave Speakers Ever and Why. Fleetwood Helios.stevehuffphoto.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Europe's dominant cultural spirit is anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-entrepreneurship, anti-business and anti-progress.

  Europe

  Their words

  Portugal's choice is cultural though and completely fits the general spirit in Europe which is fully anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-entrepreneurship, anti-business and anti-progress

  levels.io

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Optimizing JavaScript chunking strategy can produce significant efficiency gains at internet scale

  JavaScript

  Their words

  Improving Next.js chunking can yield massive efficiency improvements at internet scale.

  @rauchg on Xx.com

Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.

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  The problems of contemporary society are fundamentally religious in nature.

  Their words

  In fact, like many others, I've lately been hyperfixated on the idea that our problems are astonishingly religious in nature.

  notes on the brothers karamazovavabear.xyz

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

  AI is education's microscope: the first instrument that gives learning science a closed measurement loop at the level of one child.

  Their words

  AI because it's on a onetoone basis is giving us a data loop that nobody in learning science no one in education has ever had and we have it. It's a closed loop and that magical data loop is what's allowing us to get the five to 10 times improvements in education because it's our microscope.

  youtube.com

Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Manufacturers generally prefer cutting per-unit production costs over retooling a design for small improvements.

  Their words

  Over time companies would vastly prefer to decrease the cost per unit rather than retool for a small tweak.

  Benchmade Mini Bugout in S90V Revieweverydaycommentary.com

Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Concentrated power has been bad at every moment of human history, and a society is best off when power is spread as widely as possible.

  startups

  Their words

  I think concentration of power has basically been bad in every moment of human history um to varying degrees of course but I have a real spirit and I think this is part of the startup spirit of thinking that the world, the economy, society is the best off when power is very widely distributed

  youtube.com

Physician and neuroscientist at the University of Washington; researches brain health, metabolism and athletic performance.

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  Putting older adults into activities that are genuinely new to them improves cognitive function in randomised trials, with executive function the most reliable gain.

  Their words

  However, there's an increasing body of literature that shows that by engaging older adults in novel cognitive activities, you see improvements in function. So that can be language learning. Uh that can be uh complex like coordinative movement or exercise. You see the same things with um like musical training like people learning a new musical instrument or learning um musical theory trying to identify different patterns in music. And you see in randomized control trials improvements particularly in executive function that seems to be most common across those different interventions.

  youtube.com

Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Harness improvements help deploy a model better, but the model's underlying intelligence remains the core driver of capability.

  Their words

  harness improvement enables better deployment of the model but intelligence is still the core.

  Harness Engineering for Self-Improvementlilianweng.github.io

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  It would be disappointing and surprising if the next five years of AI progress in mathematics produced no economically valuable improvements traceable to it.

  Their words

  but it would be a little bit disappointing and a little bit surprising if there weren't over the next 5 years like, uh, economically valuable improvements that were made that were directly like referable to the like AI progress in math.

  youtube.com

Music critic of The New Yorker since 1996 and author of The Rest Is Noise, Listen to This and Wagnerism.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Contemporary composition is as vital as ever.

  Their words

  Although the musical scene exhilarates me more than ever - contemporary composition is eternally vital - I wouldn't want to overstay my welcome.

  Personal notetherestisnoise.com

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

  Most contemporary restaurants are over-optimized, investor-backed, and homogenized by branding rather than genuine culinary vision.

  Their words

  The average restaurant in NYC is, at this point, stupidly optimized, backed by wealthy investors, coated in impeccable branding.

  Utopia is a particular restaurant in Brooklynsashachapin.substack.com

Developer and podcaster; created Instapaper and Overcast, co-founded Tumblr, and co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The tech industry today is dominated by scale-driven optimization and growth at the expense of the idealism that once drove it

  Their words

  Immense scale, soulless optimization, and an insatiable thirst for growth dominate its behavior and discourse, leaving little room for the spirit and principles embodied by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

  A letter to John Ternusmarco.org

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Over-indexing on small daily improvements causes a business to miss bigger, more impactful opportunities.

  Their words

  if you over-index on the idea of small improvements, then you stop seeing the pivotal, critical mass movements that you might make.

  thebootstrappedfounder.com

Writer and artist, author of Steal Like an Artist; publishes a weekly newsletter and an annual list of the books he read.

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Muybridge

  Their words

  I think this book is a contemporary masterpiece? A cartoonist at the top of his game, a perfect meeting of subject and medium, and beautiful book design by Drawn and Quarterly.

  austinkleon.com

China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Specimen Days

  Their words

  Tying them all together is Whitman's love for the American landscape and people, and his unique voice, so fresh he still seems like a contemporary.

  andrewbatson.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

Chairman and chief executive of Microsoft since 2014; joined the company in 1992 and ran its cloud business before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most of the gain in tokens per dollar per watt comes from software, not from new hardware — 5x, 10x, sometimes 40x on one model family.

  Their words

  the improvement software improvements of really throughput in terms of tokens per dollar per watt that we're able to get uh you know quarter over quarter year over year is massive uh right so it's 5x 10x maybe 40x in some of these cases

  Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGIyoutube.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We are not building animals, we are summoning ghosts: entities made by imitating human text rather than by evolution.

  Their words

  we're not doing training by evolution. Uh we're doing training by basically imitation of humans and the data that they've put on the internet. And so you end up with these like sort of ethereal spirit entities because they're fully digital and they're kind of like mimicking humans.

  youtube.com

Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Contemporary consumer products no longer claim purity or naturalness; they present themselves openly as artificial mixtures.

  Their words

  Any pretense of the pure or organic is undercut by a kind of willful alchemy; everything is an admixture.

  Labubus and the brainrot aesthetickylechayka.substack.com

Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The System: A Novel of the Deep State

  Their words

  I love Barry’s writing and read every book he writes. He has total mastery of the contemporary thriller with extraordinarily vibrant characters and a zillion endnotes that tie to things that are actually happening in the real world.

  feld.com

Labour politician. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 2024 to June 2026, and MP for Holborn and St Pancras from 2015 until standing down in 2026. Director of Public Prosecutions before entering Parliament.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Means-testing the winter fuel payment is a tough decision that has to be taken, and it should stand.

  Their words, before

  No Prime Minister wants to do what we have to do in relation to the winter fuel allowance, but we have to take the tough decision to stabilise our economy to ensure that we can grow it for the future.

  Their words now

  However, I recognise that people are still feeling the pressure of the cost of living crisis, including pensioners, and as the economy improves, we want to make sure that people feel those improvements each day as their lives go forward. That is why we want to ensure that more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments as we go forward.

Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Innovation depends on being near the factory floor; you cannot improve what is thirty hours of travel away.

  Their words

  When the factory floor is down the hall, instead of 30 hours of travel away, it’s easier to make improvements and invent.

  molsonhart.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Impressive-looking benchmark improvements often result from comparing against a poorly-tuned baseline rather than a genuine advance.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  It's easy to get impressive-looking results if you're comparing against a poorly-tuned baseline, and that observation turns out to explain a surprising fraction of supposed improvements.

  blog.nelhage.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI tooling and interface design lags behind the underlying models' actual capabilities.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Overall, though, this experience reinforced my belief that the tooling and interface design around LLMs is lagging way behind the actual capabilities, and is an area of active experimentation and development, even aside from any future model improvements.

  Building personal software with Claudeblog.nelhage.com

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

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Season of the Swamp

  Their words

  Yuri Herrera is one of the few contemporary authors whose books I will always buy and know I will love.

  countercraft.substack.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.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Sunglasses After Dark

  Their words

  Mind candy, horror/contemporary fantasy: the first four "Sonja Blue" novels.

  bactra.org

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  In the Blood

  Their words

  Mind candy, horror/contemporary fantasy: the first four "Sonja Blue" novels.

  bactra.org

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  Paint It Black

  Their words

  Mind candy, horror/contemporary fantasy: the first four "Sonja Blue" novels.

  bactra.org

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Without the yield improvements of the last half-century the world would have cleared more than twice as much cropland.

  Their words

  Without yield improvements, therefore, we would have seen more than double the cropland expansion.

  Raising Agricultural Yields Spares Landthebreakthrough.org

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.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Dark Country

  Their words

  Mind candy horror/mystery, stalking and being stalked by the somewhat-supernatural serial killer, with extensive local color for contemporary South Africa. There are rough patches, but it's a perfectly enjoyable specimen of this type of novel. It's obviously the set-up for a series, and I'm not sure I need to follow these characters, but I would be happy to read more by Snyman.

  bactra.org

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solar has got cheaper faster than even its most optimistic forecasters expected.

  solar

  Their words

  A number of commentators have consistently predicted that solar cost improvements will level out “this year” since about 1990, and yet if anything deployment, cost decline, and the learning rate have only improved.

  Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Virtually all economics of contemporary significance is empirical work.

  Their words

  Virtually all contemporary economics of note is empirical work

  tylercowen.com

Musician and writer; answers readers' questions weekly at The Red Hand Files, and fronts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Mechanising the imagination commodifies the human spirit, because it makes a person's own part in making things look valueless.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary.

  theredhandfiles.com

American backpacking guide, writer and endurance athlete who has hiked more than 30,000 miles; author of The Ultimate Hiker's Gear Guide and publisher of gear reviews and trip-planning tutorials at andrewskurka.com.

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  Garmin inReach Mini 2

  Their words

  I own an inReach Mini, used it for several years, and have no intention of upgrading to the Mini 2 because I don't see $400 of value in these improvements (or even $250, if I was able to sell my used Mini for $150).

  andrewskurka.com

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for the protein-structure work behind AlphaFold.

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  Contemporary physical and evolutionary structure-prediction approaches fall far short of experimental accuracy without a close experimental homologue, limiting biological utility.

  Their words

  Despite these advances, contemporary physical and evolutionary-history-based approaches produce predictions that are far short of experimental accuracy in the majority of cases in which a close homologue has not been solved experimentally and this has limited their utility for many biological applications.

  doi.org

Wine writer and Master of Wine; Financial Times wine columnist, editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine and co-author of The World Atlas of Wine.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  World Atlas of Wine

  Their words

  The World Atlas of Wine has unrivalled maps. Hugh did a fantastic job, the real spadework, of getting some top quality maps of the world's classic wine regions and many of the new ones. The original editions had Hugh's matchless prose, trying to encapsulate the spirit of each region in surrounding texts, but the maps are the thing, and some photographs.

  fivebooks.com

Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Phenomenology of Spirit

  Their words

  In order to understand Marx, you really do need to know something about Hegel. It's a mistake to think you could read Marx as a scientist or an economist without understanding the Hegelian framework of his thought. That's why I chose to begin with Hegel.

  fivebooks.com

Associate Professor at MIT CSAIL, leading the Programming Systems Group; works on programming systems that manipulate uncertainty, from neural networks to unreliable hardware.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The saving pruning offers is only ever at inference, because the sparse architectures it produces are hard to train from the start.

  Their words

  However, contemporary experience is that the sparse architectures produced by pruning are difficult to train from the start, which would similarly improve training performance.

  arxiv.org

Chief AI Scientist at Databricks, after its acquisition of MosaicML, where he was a founding team member; known for the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis from his MIT PhD (ICLR 2019 Best Paper).

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The saving pruning offers is only ever at inference, because the sparse architectures it produces are hard to train from the start.

  Their words

  However, contemporary experience is that the sparse architectures produced by pruning are difficult to train from the start, which would similarly improve training performance.

  arxiv.org

Civil engineer and land use planner, founder and president of Strong Towns, author of Escaping the Housing Trap. Argues that the American pattern of development since the Second World War does not generate enough wealth to maintain the infrastructure it obliges cities to keep.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cities have only ever built wealth incrementally, by many small improvements over a long time, not by big projects.

  Their words

  Yet, incremental investment is how cities have always built wealth.

  The Power of Growing Incrementallystrongtowns.org