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Software engineer and educator; creator of Testing Library and of the EpicWeb.dev and EpicReact.dev courses.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Connecting an agent in one place and then switching the main driver to another location is suboptimal.

  Their words

  I don't yet have numbers to back this up, but I gotta believe that someone connecting their agent to Kody in one agent and then switching their main driver to another somewhere else is suboptimal.

  @kentcdodds on Xx.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Migrations are part and parcel of software engineering and a skill to invest in, not special one-offs to avoid.

  Their words

  migrations (e.g. replacing one service with a new one, or switching database engines, or whatever) are part and parcel of software engineering and are a skill that you should invest in and get good at, not avoid or treat as special one-offs.

  simonwillison.net

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

  The largest tech companies are not using fewer tokens; they are switching to cheaper, still capable open models instead of SOTA models.

  Their words

  the largest tech companies (at the top 1%) aren't using fewer tokens, they're just being cost conscious and moving to cheaper, still very capable open models running vs SOTA model usage

  @GergelyOrosz on Xx.com

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

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  Vercel AI Gateway

  Their words

  Points all coding agents to AI Gateway, getting you 100% uptime, observability, budgets, and ease of switching.

  x.com

Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Switching to sustainable energy is the one effective, scalable tool available to prevent catastrophic climate change.

  energy

  Their words

  "Just switching to sustainable energy" is in fact the one good, scalable weapon we have to fight that

  Two Menbillmckibben.substack.com

Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Sustainable energy alone will not save humanity from extinction events; temperature-controlling satellites and large-scale geo-engineering will be needed.

  energy

  Their words

  Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them. Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.

  @elonmusk on Xx.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Switching between tasks carries a real and measurable cost, and switching well is a trainable skill rather than a fixed property of a brain.

  Their words

  So, as soon as you switch into something, there's a cost carried over from the previous task, and you're much slower and more difficult for the couple of next trials on the new task. So, there's always a switching cost

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Companies protected by high switching costs will see those costs fall to zero, and their profits with them.

  Their words

  Okay. So now we have people who've been able to rely on switching costs to protect their profits and the switching costs just drop to zero. Their profits are going to drop to zero and and some people aren't going to survive that change.

  youtube.com

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The scarce skill is now context switching across parallel agents, not sustained deep work.

  Their words

  It’s not so much about deep work, it’s about how good I am at context switching and jumping across multiple different contexts very quickly.

  newsletter.pragmaticengineer.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

  People do not switch from meat to cheap plant protein as they get richer; they switch the other way.

  Their words

  Across much of the world, the opposite is happening: people are switching from these plant-based staples to meat and dairy as their incomes rise.

  Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com

Technology analyst whose weekly email on tech reaches over 150,000 readers. Publishes essays and an annual presentation on where the industry is going.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Large language models have no network effect, and remembering a user is a switching cost rather than one.

  LLMs

  Their words

  there's no apparent equivalent in LLM right now there's no reason why the LMS get better because more people use them now that may come you have that open AI and people have doing memory where it remembers what else you've asked, but that seems more like a switching cost than a network effect.

  youtube.com

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

From one piece ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  VS Code and Copilot are loss leaders in an embrace-extend-extinguish play, raising the switching cost until nobody can leave.

  Their words

  Whereas something like Microsoft, they made VS Code as a loss leader. Copilot's probably operating on a loss leader. These things are all getting you so tied into, GitHub, remote workspaces, CI, Copilot, you become this trapped in permanent person and if that price rises, the switching cost is so great at some point that you'll never be able to switch.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Sticking with Neovim is not loyalty to the editor: if an AI editor like Cursor met the same needs, switching would be easy.

  Their words

  I don't use Neovim because I love Neovim, I use Neovim because I love the instrument I play. And so it's like if Cursor can meet those needs, I could see myself moving over. I don't have some sort of obsessed attachment with it.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There are two ways to run a company — founder mode and manager mode — and Silicon Valley has wrongly assumed that scaling a startup means switching to the second.

  startups

  Their words

  In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode.

  Founder Modepaulgraham.com

Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Nix is worth switching your day-to-day package management to, over Homebrew.

  Nixdeveloper tools

  Their words, before

  I’m also still not sure how much I like nix – it’s very confusing! But it’s helped me compile some software that I was struggling to compile otherwise, and in general it seems to install things faster than homebrew.

  Their words now

  I’ve mostly switched back to Homebrew, nix was interesting but overall I think it’s not worth the complexity for me

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Task-switching destroys memory by chopping an experience into artificial event boundaries, so you spend the whole session catching up instead of building a model.

  Their words

  It just kind of vanished, because what happens, I’m creating all these artificial event boundaries. I’m losing all this executive function every time I switch, I’m getting a few seconds slower and I’m catching up mentally to what’s happening.

  youtube.com

Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  fast.ai

  Their words

  https://course.fast.ai/ is a free course on deep learning with PyTorch. It helped me get started with deep learning, though I didn’t get that far.

  jvns.ca

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Cree 100W-equivalent 5000K LED bulbs

  Their words

  Update 2020-11-16: For my home, I ended up switching from the corncob bulb to three 7-way splitters and 21 100W equivalent 5000K Cree bulbs from Home Depot. I found the Cree bulbs on sale so they were about the same price, the light was more diffused and they have a higher color-rendering index.

  benkuhn.net