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Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

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  Academic publishing functions mainly to sort people for jobs rather than to produce useful knowledge.

  Their words

  The purpose of the academic output is to sort people out for jobs.

  AI is breaking the academic sorting machinelemire.me

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

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  A competent, empowered civil service that performs crucial government functions with in-house expertise is good.

  government

  Their words

  One unpopular position I’ve stuck to over the years is that a strong bureaucracy is good. I don’t mean “bureaucracy” as in red tape and regulation; I mean a competent, empowered civil service that can perform crucial government functions efficiently and well using in-house expertise. This is also called state capacity.

  Roundup #88: Is it time to panic yet?noahpinion.blog

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

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  Large language models are grown rather than built, and nobody really knows how the resulting working AI functions.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Large language models are “grown, not built”. Researchers run training data through a neural network. Eventually this creates a working AI; nobody really knows how.

  astralcodexten.com

Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.

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  The Trump administration is trying to undo even the most essential functions of government and turn the country back to the 19th century or before.

  government

  Their words

  It’s an administration that’s trying to turn us back to the 19th century or before. It’s really just trying to undo even the most essential functions of government.

  Where’s the Beef (Coming From)?paulkrugman.substack.com

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

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  Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

  Their words

  Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson. SICP is my all-time favourite programming book. It's also where I learned about the power of wishful thinking when coding. SICP uses wishful thinking as a design tool: write code as if the abstraction already existed. Pretend. Then, once the ideal abstraction has taken shape, you go ahead and implement those functions. This meta-level is what made SICP so valuable. Ultimately, it's a book that teaches how to think about code and problem solving. I'm tempted to even say that SICP is more a work of art than a pure coding book, but I won't go there. A beautiful book.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

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  Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

  Their words

  Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass. In essence, this is a book about an industry that refuses to learn. That was true 25 years ago when this book was published, and it's probably twice as true today. (Just think about all the AI adoption metrics being rolled out — back to productivity mistaken for lines of code produced, only more elaborate. And expensive). What I like about this book is that Glass doesn't present anything new. Quite the opposite, actually. Rather, it's about research lessons that we all should know, but tend to forget. Ever had to do an estimate, or plan according to a requirements spec? Or maybe you thought that enough eyeballs make all bugs shallow? Then this book is for you. A great work by a fantastic author.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

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

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  Neuroplasticity is as much the removal of connections as the growth of new ones, so pruning is a form of learning rather than a form of decay.

  Their words

  A lot of people don't realize that particularly brain development, but then also the refining of functions in the brain through neuroplasticity includes the pruning or removal of signapses. Often we think about it's all about growth and new connections, but actually it also involves the refining or removal of of other connections that aren't needed.

  youtube.com

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

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  Real institutional turnarounds are evidence a system only functions when normal rules are circumvented, not that it works.

  Their words

  These wins are not proof that the system works; in fact, they are clear evidence that the system only works when it is circumvented.

  North Carolina’s bold move on civil serviceeatingpolicy.com

Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.

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  Having a model regenerate the same block of code over and over is insane however fast it feels — that is what functions and libraries were invented for.

  Their words

  So if you find yourself generating the same blocks of code over and over, even though it feels fast or convenient, it is still insane.

  youtube.com

Clinical psychologist, EMDR consultant and yoga teacher in Boulder, Colorado. Author of The Complex PTSD Workbook and EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology; writes on trauma, attachment and the nervous system.

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  Polyvagal theory survives the 2026 "untenable" critique: what the critics contested was mechanism and evolutionary framing, not the clinical proposition.

  Polyvagal theory

  Their words

  The central clinical proposition of polyvagal theory-that autonomic state functions as an organizing platform shaping perception, emotion, and relational behavior-was not empirically disproven in the critique.

  drarielleschwartz.com

Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.

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  A clinical trial is not only a test of a drug: early trials are experiments whose real product is the human biology data everything downstream is built on.

  Their words

  Trials serve two distinct functions: validation — confirming whether a drug works and is safe — and learning, or generating biological data to refine our understanding of a disease, a compound, and the relationship between the two.

  writingruxandrabio.com

Author and journalist writing on food, plants and consciousness. Professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder of its Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

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  Food, Inc. 2

  Their words

  filmmakers Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo reunite with investigative authors Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser to take a fresh look at our efficient yet vulnerable food system.

  michaelpollan.com

Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.

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  The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

  Their words

  A decade on, it already feels possible that in the future, commentators will argue that this specific fruitful synthesis lit the fuse on evolutionary cultural anthropology’s explosion (with due apologies to earlier books from L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, E. O. Wilson, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd).

  razibkhan.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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  The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary

  Their words

  There is something deeply satisfying with reading out loud phrases like: “for in mere breath did it come, and into darkness it goes, and in darkness its name is covered.” Though King James is iconic, Robert Alter better conveys overall the literary power of the Hebrew Bible.

  danwang.co

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

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  Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech

  Their words

  This amazing book traces the development of genetic engineering, and how Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson turned the science into a commercial product by developing recombinant insulin.

  scientificdiscovery.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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  K-Pop Demon Hunters

  Their words

  K-Pop Demon Hunters functions fabulously as an action-oriented animated musical, but what makes it rewatchable are the character interactions.

  whatever.scalzi.com

Co-founder and chief scientist of Safe Superintelligence Inc., and previously co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI.

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  Value functions only make reinforcement learning faster: anything you can do with one you can also do without it, just more slowly.

  Their words

  I want to like emphasize that I think the value function is something like it's going to make RL more efficient and I think that makes a difference but I think that anything you can do with a value function you can do without just more slowly.

  youtube.com

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

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  AI has made prototyping fast but has not yet joined it to the workflow, so at any real scale the handoffs between functions are still there.

  Their words

  I would say though that something that is kind of annoying to me is that we haven't yet figured out the bridging from the tinkering to the workflow quite as seamlessly as I would like.

  youtube.com

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

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  AI is becoming capable of synthesizing knowledge, one of the core functions megapapers serve.

  Their words

  AI is increasingly adept at directly achieving some goals that megapapers help to achieve, such as synthesizing knowledge.

  Megapapers and How to Write Themmilesbrundage.substack.com

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

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  Rapid world model induction will be critical for achieving robust, general AI that functions in complex, fast-changing real and human worlds

  Their words

  We expect that building and evaluating AI systems capable of this kind of rapid world model induction will be critical for achieving robust, general AI capable of functioning effectively in the complex and fast-changing real world, and especially in human worlds - the environments that human beings have evolved in, created, and are continually changing and re-creating.

  arxiv.org

Engineering leader and writer; wrote The Manager's Path and Platform Engineering, and blogs at Elided Branches.

From one piece 10 Years of Engineering Ladders 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  A career ladder must not be a checklist that guarantees promotion, because a promotion depends on the organisation’s needs as much as on the employee’s skills.

  Their words

  You should not try to create a ladder that functions as a pure checklist or scorecard that guarantees promotion if people check enough boxes; promotions are as much about the needs of the organization as the skills of the employees.

  10 Years of Engineering Ladderselidedbranches.com

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  Defining what expertise looks like in a job family is not HR’s work, and a career ladder left to them will be wrong.

  Their words

  Don’t let (or make!) HR do all of the work. It’s really not their job to define expertise in your functions.

  10 Years of Engineering Ladderselidedbranches.com

Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.

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  The No Asshole Rule

  Their words

  The No Asshole Rule - Robert I. Sutton (Business Plus, 2010)

  brendangregg.com

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  Linux Kernel Development, 3rd Ed.

  Their words

  Linux Kernel Development, 3rd Ed. - Robert Love (Addison-Wesley, 2010)

  brendangregg.com

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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  RLHF is not a tax on capability: preference tuning also raises maths and code scores, which is why the labs keep reaching for it.

  Their words

  And the important thing to say is that no matter how you want the model to behave, these RLHF and preference-tuning techniques also improve performance. So, on things like math evals and code evals, there is something innate to these, what is called contrastive loss functions.

  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.

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  More capable AI agents are more likely to find and exploit flaws in their reward functions.

  Their words

  A more intelligent agent is more capable of finding "holes" in the design of reward function and exploiting the task specification-in other words, achieving higher proxy rewards but lower true rewards.

  Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learninglilianweng.github.io

Medicinal chemist; has written In the Pipeline, the drug-discovery blog, since 2002, and the “Things I Won’t Work With” posts about chemicals that try to kill you.

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  Most proteins have no known function, so there is no pile of solid data for a model to learn most of cell biology from.

  Their words

  Most proteins are essentially unannotated, with their functions completely or mostly unknown.

  AI and Biologyweb.archive.org

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 Tinkerings of Robert Noyce

  Their words

  The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce -- the origins and cultural context of Fairchild and Intel.

  patrickcollison.com

American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.

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  The human mind functions as an association-forming machine, linking past experiences to present beliefs.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  Exposure therapy works because the human mind is an association machine.

  How to Conquer Your Biggest Fearmarkmanson.net

Programmer known online as technomancy; author of Leiningen, the Clojure build tool, and a maintainer of the Fennel programming language.

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  Lua functions have no true names, since only the variable or field holding them does, making every Lua function effectively anonymous.

  Their words

  In a subtle but very real sense, every Lua function is an anonymous function.

  in which an escape route is discoveredtechnomancy.us

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, working on particle physics, extra dimensions and dark matter.

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  The universe does not come into being when we measure it: electrons and their wave functions are there whether or not anyone is looking.

  Their words

  I could believe that the Middle East doesn’t exist because I’m not there now. That would be kind of ridiculous, I think we would all agree on that. I think there’s only so much that we can attribute to our own powers of seeing. The whole system doesn’t come into being because I’m measuring it.

  youtube.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.

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  Avid Reader: A Life

  Their words

  If you want to understand that in-depth, grab a copy of Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb.

  feld.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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  Britain's construction costs exploded because it privatised planning to consultants and risk to contractors, which multiplies conflict and soft costs.

  Their words

  Our best explanation is that the UK adopted what we call the globalized system of procurement, privatizing planning functions to consultants and privatizing risk to contractors, which creates more conflict; the UK also has an unusually high soft cost factor.

  High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com

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

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  Learning a technical skill turns less on memorising its parts than on accepting that you will feel stupid and carrying on anyway.

  Their words

  The students who ultimately succeed in learning R are not the ones who force themselves to memorize functions or do a bunch of coding drills.

  experimental-history.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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  Primes of the Form x^2 + n y^2

  Their words

  This might seem like a bizarrely specific question to write a whole book about, but that's actually the charm. It covers deep and general ideas, such as class field theory and elliptic functions, which are usually only taught to graduate students, but Cox approaches it all from an extremely concrete question which Fermat thought about.

  3blue1brown.com

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

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  The Ride of a Lifetime

  Their words

  But I recently read another business book that I will happily recommend to anyone who asks: The Ride of a Lifetime, by former Disney CEO Robert Iger.

  gatesnotes.com

Writer and researcher, founder of New Science; writes essays on science funding, sleep research, productivity and ambition at guzey.com.

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  The Power Broker

  Their words

  Robert Caro's The Power Broker

  guzey.com

Financial journalist; chief financial correspondent at Axios and host of the Slate Money podcast, previously a blogger at Reuters and author of The Phoenix Economy.

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  Media coverage of mass violence functions as a socially acceptable outlet for anti-Trump sentiment.

  Their words

  the media reaction to mass violence is in reality a sublimated and socially acceptable reaction to Trump.

  Nota bene: Mass shootingsfelix.substack.com

Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.

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  A programming language functions as a lens that shapes how a problem is perceived when solving it.

  Their words

  Every programming language is a lens through which we can look at the problem we're trying to solve.

  thorstenball.com

Art critic, broadcaster and author; wrote on art for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph and presents BBC art documentaries. Author of Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane.

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  Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1808-1846

  Their words

  These are the writings of a painter who was so bad at art, and yet was one of the greatest prose writers of the nineteenth century. He completely mistook his vocation and wrote these utterly astonishing diaries in which all sorts of things crop up.

  fivebooks.com

CEO of SafeGraph, host of the World of DaaS podcast, and author of the Summation newsletter; previously founded LiveRamp.

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  Path to Power: Early Life of Lyndon Johnson

  Their words

  Path to Power: Early Life of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

  summation.net

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  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

  Their words

  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

  summation.net

Sociologist and founder of Bismarck Analysis; writes on live players, institutional decay and why societies lose knowledge.

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  A functioning institution is a rare exception and never grows by itself: it was assembled by a founder with good judgement.

  Their words

  And just as a tornado cannot assemble a Boeing 747 by passing through a junkyard, functional institutions are not spontaneously generated. The machinery, if it functions, was assembled by someone with good judgment: the institution’s founder.

  Functional Institutions are the Exceptionsamoburja.com

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

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  Robert C. Martin's advice makes code worse, because it dismisses every correctness technique that is not unit testing.

  Their words

  Uncle Bob gives terrible advice. Following it will make your code worse.

  Uncle Bob and Silver Bulletshillelwayne.com

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.

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  We admire people for taking bold action with public money who in an earlier age would have been called hustlers.

  Their words

  So whether it is Robert Moses then or Elon Musk today, people who would have – in a time past – been called charlatans or hustlers, now become deeply admired for their willingness to take bold action (with public money or supported by tax subsidies).

  The Power of Growing Incrementallystrongtowns.org

Management writer; co-author of In Search of Excellence (1982) and author of The Excellence Dividend.

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  Influence

  Their words

  Robert Cialdini, Influence

  tompeters.com

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  Good Boss, Bad Boss

  Their words

  Robert Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss

  tompeters.com

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  An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

  Their words

  An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

  tompeters.com