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Forecaster, founder of FiveThirtyEight, author of The Signal and the Noise and On the Edge. Writes Silver Bulletin, where the predictions come with numbers and the numbers are later checked against what happened.

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  Substantive AI regulation is more likely to pass than conventional wisdom suggests.

  Their words

  I don’t know what odds I’d give, but I’m probably bullish on the odds of substantive regulation passing relative to the conventional wisdom.

  A supermajority wants to slow AI downnatesilver.net

Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.

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  Germany's crisis is too deep to be solved by conventional tax, spending, or regulatory adjustments.

  Their words

  Germany is in trouble. But the trouble goes deep and cannot be addressed by "more of the same" socio-economic measures in the domain of taxes or social spending or regulation.

  adamtooze.substack.com

Professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M; writes The Climate Brink with Zeke Hausfather.

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  In risk management, severe but low-probability outcomes should shape policy responses, not just the likeliest scenario.

  Their words

  In fact, conventional risk management tells us that, when consequences are severe, low-probability extreme outcomes can determine the response.

  The Worst Case Is Still on the Tabletheclimatebrink.com

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

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  Homeschooling outcomes are bimodal: families who care about academics beat conventional school outright, and families who reject standards leave their children knowing very little.

  Their words

  The level of academics that those students know is very low because the parents have basically abandoned that and said, "I care all about the life skills." For parents who really care about academics, those kids crush it.

  youtube.com

Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.

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  ADHD is a real condition and over-diagnosed at the same time; the two claims are not incompatible, because the line marking normality is a judgement call.

  Their words

  But I also think that this is not mutually incompatible with the view that there's also overdiagnosis. And I think we need very careful ways of making diagnosis because the conventional way is you take a history from a person about what the problem is.

  youtube.com

British comics writer and novelist (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, The Authority, Gun Machine). Keeps a public daily notebook logging what he reads, watches and listens to.

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  Sisu 2: Road to Revenge

  Their words

  LAST WATCHED: SISU 2: ROAD TO REVENGE (2025) is, sadly, a more conventional film than the original. Still lots of bloody fun, but too similar to the original in its beats to be as enjoyable, trying harder to be “emotional” while losing some of the little textual depth that made the first film surprising.

  warrenellis.ltd

Engineering leader on Google Chrome; writes about web performance and, lately, about working with AI coding tools.

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  The point of building a self-sufficient organisation is not to step back from it, but to free yourself to work on the problem the organisation has not reached yet.

  Their words

  you want to get to a point where you know, your your machine, your org is self-sufficient enough that you know, you just need to occasionally tap the blimp, make sure that things are working. You can course correct if it's not, but that frees you up to then focus on the next important sets of problems that the org needs to, you know, tackle heads on.

  youtube.com

Senior space editor at Ars Technica; wrote Liftoff and Reentry on SpaceX, and reports on launch and rocket programmes.

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  A few square miles at the Moon's south pole are the only lunar real estate that matters, and whoever gets there first sets the terms.

  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.

  arstechnica.com

Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.

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  Almost every recent AI breakthrough has been in code and mathematics, the two domains with highly structured languages and huge specialised training sets.

  Their words

  But if you zoom out, it becomes clear that almost every “breakthrough” since last summer has concerned the narrow domains of computer code and math, which are defined by highly structured languages and come accompanied by massive amounts of specialized training data.

  On AI Coding and Its Discontentscalnewport.com

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

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  The single most valuable thing a founder can find is a belief they can hold with reason that the conventional wisdom says is wrong.

  Their words

  is find the things that you can develop like reasonable conviction in that people decide like the conventional wisdom is they're just wrong. And be okay with it taking a long time and having people be like very you know, very frustratingly wrong and dismissive.

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

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  Partner dancing, not puzzles, has the best evidence of any activity for improving cognitive function in older adults.

  Their words

  there are meta analyses of these interventions in older adults showing that ballroom and line dancing have the greatest effect on cognitive function. And so both of those require other people as well as learning you know various sets of of movements.

  youtube.com

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

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  Benjamin Britten is the benchmark among English-language composers for setting the work of intensely musical writers like Shakespeare and Keats to music.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  In the English-language arena, Britten sets the standard for handling writers of inborn musical power-the likes of Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Hopkins.

  Liner notes to What Belongs to Youtherestisnoise.com

Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".

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  Group committees tend to flatten distinctive or unconventional viewpoints into blander, more conventional output.

  Their words

  With people, the problem with committees is that they "smooth out" all idiosyncrasies. They take out any "spiky" points of view, and make things much more normie.

  LLM councils show groupthinkstrangeloopcanon.com

Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.

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  Foundation-owned companies are six times more likely to reach their fiftieth year, and they return more to investors rather than less.

  Their words

  companies with that structure like Novo and Zeiss, they are six times more likely to live to year 50 compared to their conventional counterparts. We they have superior return on invested capital. They make more money for investors.

  youtube.com

Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.

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  Amusing Ourselves to Death

  Their words

  It's a little outdated, but still worth reading just to see how the world has, or hasn't, changed in the past 40 years.

  arslan.io

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.

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  A comedy world cannot run on jokes alone: forty hours of humour needs story, heart and drama underneath it or it stops working.

  Their words

  I hope it’s got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise, you can’t just have jokes for 40 hours, it won’t work.

  youtube.com

Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

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  T. rex never ran in the biomechanical sense — it was a power walker that always kept one foot on the ground.

  Their words

  And yeah, big theropods, T-rex, is going to be a power walker. It's not going to run in the conventional biomechanical sense where both feet are off the ground at once.

  youtube.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.

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  Modern CPUs can now predict the indirect dispatch jump in a bytecode interpreter loop with high accuracy.

  Their words

  Modern CPUs mostly no longer struggle to predict the bytecode-dispatch indirect jump inside a "conventional" bytecode interpreter loop.

  The ITTAGE indirect branch predictorblog.nelhage.com

Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.

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  Grass-fed organic beef is worse for the climate and the planet than beef finished in a feedlot.

  Their words

  We need better beef - which means more efficient beef, not organic grass-fed beef, which is even worse for the climate and the planet than conventional feedlot-finished beef - but in the rich world we also need to eat less beef.

  WE ARE EATING THE EARTHmichaelgrunwald.substack.com

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

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  What sets mathematicians apart is caring whether something holds in 100 percent of cases, when 99.99 percent is good enough for everyone else.

  Their words

  If something holds 99.99% of the time, that's good enough for most things. But mathematicians are one of the few people who really care about whether really 100% of all situations are covered by it.

  youtube.com

Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.

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  A language model is no substitute for a well-specified conventional algorithm, so it cannot simply be dropped into a complex problem and trusted.

  AGILLMs

  Their words

  What the Apple paper shows, most fundamentally, regardless of how you define AGI, is that LLMs are no substitute for good well-specified conventional algorithms.

  A knockout blow for LLMs?garymarcus.substack.com

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

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  Text embeddings produced by different large language models converge on a shared, universal geometric structure regardless of architecture or training data.

  LLMs

  Their words

  the text embeddings across LLMs appear to largely converge on a "universal geometry" despite differing architectures, parameter counts, and training sets.

  Hegel and the AI Mindsecondbest.ca

Chancellor of Germany since May 2025; leader of the CDU.

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  Germany will provide whatever money the Bundeswehr needs to become the strongest conventional army in Europe.

  Europe

  Their words

  Die Bundesregierung wird zukünftig alle finanziellen Mittel zur Verfügung stellen, die die Bundeswehr braucht, um zur konventionell stärksten Armee Europas zu werden.

  bundesregierung.de

Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.

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  The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

  Their words

  My personal exploration of breaking free from conventional career paths to discover a more intentional and meaningful way of working and living.

  pathlesspath.com

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  Reclaiming Control: Looking Inward to Recalibrate Your Life

  Their words

  A short but 'pathless' journey through stepping off the conventional path a year after graduating, daring to ask the questions that linger below the surface. A big inspiration for deciding to write my book!

  pathlesspath.com

Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.

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  Making coding easy makes design more critical, not less: when anyone can produce working features, the quality of the experience is what sets products apart.

  Their words

  In a vibe coding future, companies will hopefully invest more in understanding user needs, refining the interface, and polishing details that delight users, because those are harder for AI to get right without guidance.

  Vibe Coding and Vibe Designjakobnielsenphd.substack.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.

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  Vertical farms are not automatically better for the climate than farming outdoors.

  Their words

  A number of studies, conducting full life-cycle analyses, have found that vertical farms currently have a higher carbon footprint than conventional outdoor farming.

  hannahritchie.substack.com

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

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  Telegram urges people away from default-encrypted messengers while refusing to build the features that would encrypt its own users.

  Their words

  Indeed, it no longer feels amusing to see the Telegram organization urge people away from default-encrypted messengers, while refusing to implement essential features that would widely encrypt their own users’ messages.

  Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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 Idea Factory

  Their words

  The Idea Factory -- sets the context for the hardware inventions that directly led to Silicon Valley.

  patrickcollison.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

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  Air cooling has run out of headroom for AI racks, so liquid cooling is now a requirement rather than an upgrade.

  Their words

  Conventional air cooling is likely limited to around 20 to 30 kilowatt racks, perhaps 50 kilowatts if rear heat exchangers are used.

  How to Build an AI Data Centerconstruction-physics.com

Writes Useful Fictions on agency and how to get better at things; a former appellate lawyer and the top-ranked woman in professional poker in 2017.

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  Learning a new skill set requires crossing a moat of low status, and the willingness to be visibly bad in public is itself the advantage.

  Their words

  The idea is that making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

  How to be more agenticusefulfictions.substack.com

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

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  What sets a company’s velocity is spending its time on the right things, not how much code it produces.

  Their words

  What matters is moving the business forward, not churning out code.

  charity.wtf

Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.

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  The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science

  Their words

  the poetic physicist Alan Lightman sets out to illuminate how these atomic constellations can be capable of such exultant spiritual experiences

  themarginalian.org