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20 September
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Today modern advertising, public relations and corporate values statements typically carry any equivalent constraints to the old-fashioned check on rhetoric imposed by the imminent expectation of contradiction by an opposing equally-platformed counter-advocate. Contrast 1858’s Lincoln and Douglas, “divid[ing] time and address[ing] the same audiences” in seven three-hour debates, with modern corporate values statement radiating outward to “stakeholders” forever, and you can measure what... 1/ Related
19 September
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
The EAs I know are generally lovely people, smart, thoughtful. I have a very low p(doom). I know many people with one much higher than mine. I believe each is sincere. AI safety debates are getting heated. Let's assume sincerity and good will of people we disagree with. AI alignment Related
16 September
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
This was a fun paper to write, though my views on international relations debates are just slightly less obnoxious than the argument might be read to suggest (more on that soon) issforum.org
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15 September
American author of The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy and Stillness Is the Key. Writes the Reading List book-recommendation email (started 2008) and owns The Painted Porch bookstore in Bastrop, Texas. Hosts The Daily Stoic podcast.
How to Get More Out of Every Book You Read Sign up and join us at https://t.co/kcLi9BVU76 before September 21 to get invited to a live Q&A with me Related
Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.
J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small, splendid essay collect…
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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.
If anyone wants a nice side project... The fast number parsing fast_float (part of GCC, and other important systems like MySQL) is not always exact when dealing with 16-bit float parsing (specifically float16_t). That is, some number strings can lie in between two numbers and the rounding is wrong. In fact, nobody has done a proper analysis of the implementation to insure that it is correct. Yeah. I could ask my AI, but it is still work, especially because I do not trust anyone, not even an AI, to get it correct the first time around. Contributions invited. github.com
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14 September
Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
startups
Their words
Technologies are not neutral, but political. Money is indeed one of the incentives, but not the only one. A mixture of millennialism, eugenics, search for utopia and for a spread of the specie beyond the confines of the Earth, are all elements we find among the founders’ views.
Show the whole quote
branko2f7.substack.com
12 September
Co-founder of Modem and a founding engineer at Sentry, where he went on to be VP of Engineering. Co-author of Third-party JavaScript, and co-host of the State of Agentic Coding podcast with Armin Ronacher.
It took writing a programming book, speaking at 20+ confs, leading eng at a billion-dollar startup, having some OSS projects people use, getting invited on podcasts, starting a company, hanging out with smart / successful people who seemed to think I knew what I was doing … … before accepting maybe it wasn’t all a fluke Quoting @threepointone you don’t understand, i’m the world’s best imposter, absolutely world class imposter skills, a lifetime of developing them to be so convincing, i’ve somehow accumulated promotions, references, a career, and a body of work purely as supporting evidence for the bit. startups Related
11 September
Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.
For the August/September issue of Forbes Australia, I was invited to answer The Last Word, a series of questions that range from the serious to the personal. Thank you to Forbes Australia and Sarah O’Carroll for the feature. #PeterSinger #ForbesAustralia #Philosophy #Ethics #EffectiveAltruism Related
Front-end developer and writer; co-founder of CodePen, founder of CSS-Tricks, and co-host of the ShopTalk Show podcast.
you're all invited to my couscous booze cruise (don't snooze you can't lose) Related
9 September
Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.
Did you hear about the UK government report on ecosystem collapse? It was created not only by the environment department but also intelligence agencies like MI5 and MI6. Reporters were invited to see the unveiling of this report in October 2025 - but at the last minute the Prime Minister blocked it! Luckily the Greens forced the release of a 14-page redacted version. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗸𝗲𝘆 𝗷𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁: 𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗮 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗽𝘀𝗲 - 𝗶𝗿𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 �… government Related
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
I hear roughly 3 reasons people keep working at AI labs despite believing in ~10% extinction risk: 1) Techno-determinism: Someone will build ASI no matter what, and I can do it better & more safely than China/OpenAI/etc 2) Consequentialism: ASI might kill us, but it also might produce utopia/immortality/superabundance, so it's a +EV bet 3) Self-interest: I am personally having fun & getting rich working on cool tech with friends. I don't think about the macro stuff. Notably, none of this is "I'm hyping up the risk for marketing reasons." People believe what they say, while being capable of a… Quoting @EvanHub Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. OpenAI China Related
British designer and technologist; co-founder of the design studio BERG, which made Little Printer, and writer of the blog Interconnected.
brb running a million simulated fruit flies in fruit fly utopia then going out and doing something really awful tonight so I'm still karmically balanced Related
1 September
Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.
5 August
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.
I'm very excited to have been invited to Gloucester History Festival on the 20th September - and I hope to see you there! https://t.co/9kwJ2iJTr8 @GlosHistFest Related
3 August
Security researcher; founded Have I Been Pwned, and writes and speaks about data breaches.
Mastodon Weekly update is up! Seeking Caffeine Utopia: Levelling up the Coffee Game with Customised Synesso MVP Hydra; HIBP Roadmap - What Are We Missing? troyhunt.com
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Blog Weekly Update 515: Seeking Caffeine Utopia Apparently, Aussies are so obsessed with coffee that it's referred to as the coffee capital of the world down here (some bits, at least). "But what about Italy?" people ask. Having spent a lot of time in a lot of Italy,…
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1 August
Security researcher; founded Have I Been Pwned, and writes and speaks about data breaches.
Going live with my weekly vid in 5 mins! Weekly Update 515: Seeking Caffeine Utopia: Levelling up the Coffee Game with Customised Synesso MVP Hydra; HIBP Roadmap - What Are We Missing? youtube.com
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17 July
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.
I don’t usually post DMs, but this is a rare exception as I actually asked him before doing so and he consented. Danial is a local Malaysian. Several months ago he asked “Would be cool if you could repost our current portfolio of projects as well, under KD Labs 👀”. I invited him to the Network School campus, as I do many Malaysian builders. He also said he wanted to build a virtual campus for Malaysians, a similar vision to me regarding a network state. Of course, I support him in that vision! And of course it shows that the concept of the network state, like the concept of cryptocurrency, h… Quoting @masterofnone The Network School (@ns) drama is all over the Internet What's really happening? I'm Malaysian & Irish ~ born and raised in London. Recently moved back to 🇲🇾 for good. My plan? To help build Malaysia's AI Builders Hub (@KrackedDevs) ~ upskilling our people, pulling Malaysian builders together, an… Related
2 June
Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.
1 June
Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.
14 May
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
New Article: What if We’re Already Living in Utopia? https://t.co/Dl5UNMKVfn By historical standards, modern life delivers extraordinary levels of comfort, convenience and stimulation. Yet rates of anxiety, distraction and dissatisfaction continue to rise. Related
6 May
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
19 February
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
Gold is the Safest Money Recently, a lot of people asked me a lot of questions about gold, so I invited anyone who cared to ask me questions about gold to do so, and I answered most of them.
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24 December 2025
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
31 October 2025
Co-founder of Rockstar Games, lead writer of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, and founder of Absurd Ventures since leaving in 2020.
Their words
I think the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there’s something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens, because what they’re saying is, “I like humans apart from the bad bits.”
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
3 August 2025
Philosopher at Oxford; co-founded effective altruism and 80,000 Hours, wrote Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, and now works on what a good future would actually contain.
28 July 2025
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
30 June 2025
Director of strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology; an OpenAI board member until November 2023, and writes Rising Tide.
19 January 2025
Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.
Their words
Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him, yet he's always willing to debate his opponents, and he's willing to do so with a smile on his face. He's a happy warrior, and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence, where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement.
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youtube.com
21 July 2024
Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.
1 July 2024
Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.
Years ago someone told me they were invited to a women's lunch in New York hosted by Jill Biden and ahead of the event they were all told in an email that Jill Biden requested no awkward silences Quoting @AlexThomp Jill Biden is on the July cover of Vogue. Just dropped this AM. Related
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