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Jason Evanish
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When it comes to AI, the Square Root of Slop…is Slop.
frustrations nonsense square
The the words it uses that this site has seen
least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone —
nothing here is a summary of this one.
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19 September
Designer, product manager, YouTuber and developer who has written about technology at Birchtree since 2010. He makes the Quick Reviews and Quick Notes apps and the A Better Computer YouTube channel.
Their words
app developers don't have to start from square one and reconceptualize their apps for larger displays because a lot of them have already done that by supporting the iPad.
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birchtree.me
16 September
Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.
It's a bad idea. If you dictate scientists just what to work on, you will get a low return on investment. The current science funding schemes ALREADY have this problem: pour money into some specific program, see scientists produce something that fits into the program to get the money --> topic is overcrowded with incremental and nonsense research that mostly leads nowhere. It's inefficient for the same reason planned economies are inefficient. Scientists need MORE freedom to do what they want, not less. Quoting @NewsfromScience The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a 10-page memo signaling a retreat from its traditional role of giving grants to individual researchers to pursue their best ideas and to train the next generation of scientists. Instead, the memo makes clear, NSF will devote the bulk of its resource… Related
15 September
Artist and developer who makes esoteric software, games and tools aboard a sailboat as part of Hundred Rabbits with Rekka Bellum; creator of the Uxn virtual machine and the Orca livecoding environment.
I've been scratching my head trying to think how to package assets for my #lispGameJam project, I really REALLY wanted to be able to inline assets as raw hex code, like I normally do for uxn projects, not have to read binary files, so I added a special form with square brackets that lets me to just that! This is the first sprite(a little arrow) I was able to store in my source code. Related
13 September
Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.
@Design there's this weird square in the middle of every video I open in full-screen Related
10 September
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Cold Start Problem. Previously led rider growth teams at Uber; has blogged on growth, network effects and marketplaces since 2007.
hey all- for folks who are in town (SF) Oct 5-11, we're hosting a ton of events, including at our new offices in Jackson Square. details below. -- the SF/LA Tech Week calendar is LIVE 2,300+ events across the two weeks. more than a 50% increase from last year. some other cool stats: - 1,580 events in SF, 762 in LA - 14 tracks - fundraising, deep tech, AI agents, infra, devtools, hackathons, media, fintech and more - 883 events on fundraising & investing. more than all of LA Tech Week in 2024. - 80+ a16z and portcos hosting: deel, stripe, elevenlabs, pinecone, databricks, carta, fal, exa - spa… Related
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
Was spending too much time reading Tweets, so set out to write down why one resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire -- and importantly square which claims I think are valid or hyperbole in the resulting discourse. interconnects.ai
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Economist and journalist; Financial Times columnist as The Undercover Economist, author of How to Make the World Add Up, and presenter of the Cautionary Tales podcast.
"like mounting Gatling guns on a pack of horses and then letting them loose in Times Square." calnewport.com
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26 August
Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.
Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.
Their words
I find there's a lot of like received programming wisdom that's just nonsense. Like clearly no one's ever tested it and if they did they would have found out that it's that there's no actual basis for it.
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youtube.com
19 August
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.
New puzzle, as part of the series of monthly puzzlers with @MoMath1. As a variant: What if you start with pegs in all four corners of the square, and you want them to end up on corners of a bigger square? Related
18 August
Senior space editor at Ars Technica; wrote Liftoff and Reentry on SpaceX, and reports on launch and rocket programmes.
China
Their words
In all of NASA’s and China’s plans for long-term settlement on the Moon, relatively few square miles at the South Pole of the Moon matter the most.
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arstechnica.com
14 August
Graphic designer and type designer, who created the original Macintosh icons and typefaces at Apple from 1982 and has since designed interface graphics for NeXT, Microsoft, Facebook and Pinterest.
Their words
I tried to crop a person it's not a person with a little square head it's the idea is it's a crop so you don't know the gender or the age or the hair do or really anything about this glimpse of a person.
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youtube.com
7 August
Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.
24 July
Writer and artist, author of Steal Like an Artist; publishes a weekly newsletter and an annual list of the books he read.
A sense of lightness I’ve been trying to go about the summer Friday newsletters with a sense of lightness, the way I make a collage out of scraps in my drawer — I pull out what I’ve saved, push it around until it makes sense (or nonsense),…
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3 June
Creator of Homebrew, the macOS package manager, and a Swift developer.
31 May
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
It's interesting how much (some) people are adopting AI-isms in writing even when not using AI. It makes sense that people would fall into the same patterns after seeing them everywhere, but it's still very weird to, live, watch someone who never used to write like this, write out something that's full of "It's not X, it's Y", etc. If you actually read it, it's a little too well reasoned and doesn't have enough nonsense phrases to be AI writing but, superficially, it's very AI-coded writing. Related
8 May
Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.
Their words
there's as populations become more apart, there begins to be biological incompatibilities rapidly developing, probably as the square of the distance separation, because you need pairs of interacting genes, and therefore it's the square of the separation.
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youtube.com
29 April
Co-founder and partner at Union Square Ventures in New York. Has written the AVC blog almost every day since 2003, on venture capital, startups, music and crypto.
I took a walk around the Union Square neighborhood a couple of Fridays ago with our new partner @mignano and we recorded it so everyone can listen to our conversation. We talked about the past, present, and future of startups, VC, and NYC. Quoting @mignano Fred Wilson is one of the greatest VCs of all time. He is also my new partner at @USV and I'm lucky to say that. We've known each other for years, but becoming partners felt like a reason to get to know him even better. So a few weeks ago, we walked around Union Square and caught up about what @fre… startups Related
9 December 2025
Vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, the advertising agency; author of Alchemy (2019) and the Wiki Man columnist at The Spectator.
Their words
the shareholder value movement is totally incoherent because over what time frame which shareholder is what are you optimizing for? It's a completely incoherent nonsense which is very very friendly to stock market analysts who want a ready supply of quarterly data
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youtube.com
9 November 2025
Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.
15 August 2025
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
Their words
one square meter of silicon like like the thickness of a sheet of paper floating in space that's a future human form that's that's my final form
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youtube.com
5 February 2025
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.
6 November 2024
Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.
Their words
The geometric structure of abstract nonsense.
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worrydream.com
19 June 2024
Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI answer engine; previously a research scientist at OpenAI and a PhD student at UC Berkeley.
Their words
And that is the, I would say, it’s almost like the last answer. Nothing has changed since 2017 except maybe a few changes on what the nonlinearities are and how the square descaling should be done. Some of that has changed.
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youtube.com
18 April 2024
Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.
20 February 2024
Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.
Their words
So we at Pershing Square short a very few stocks. And the reason for that is short selling is just inherently treacherous.
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youtube.com
4 January 2024
Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
2023 year in review A lot has happened in the last year, so I thought it would be good to write up a review. My biggest change in 2023 was that my wife and I had a baby! This has brought a mixture of joys and frustrations, but overall it h…
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