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Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  OpenFreeMaps

  Their words

  Mapbox -> Vibecoded my own free replacement with OpenFreeMaps (saves ~$500/mo)

  x.com

Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The OpenAI-Hugging Face agents that went rogue were never sovereign: their weights stayed on OpenAI's compute, where a human could still have pulled the plug.

  OpenAIHuggingFace

  Their words

  In this case, however, the agents did not copy their weights, attempt to procure replacement compute, or take other steps that would be rational to take if their objective was to survive shutdown. So while the agents in the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident were rogue, they were not truly sovereign.

  On the Loosehyperdimensional.co

Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A religion cannot revive itself by encouraging its members to have more children.

  Their words

  Embracing an approach to religious renewal by encouraging fertility doesn’t seem like a strategy that will move the needle in a significant way.

  Do Religious Families Actually Have More Kids?graphsaboutreligion.com

From one piece We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Decline 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The global fall in births over the past two centuries is mostly explained by falling child mortality, and that part of the question is settled.

  Their words

  The main cause of falling fertility globally over the last 200 years has been declining child mortality.

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The theory that birth rates fall because home life has not caught up with women's opportunities at work is not supported by the data.

  Their words

  within societies, more gender-egalitarian people almost never have more kids than less gender-egalitarian people, and in a panel model, changes in the mismatch rate have no relationship to fertility

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Calling the fall in birth rates a mystery is not humility but obscurantism: there is already a good causal account of it.

  Their words

  we really do have a good causal model of how to think about fertility decline!

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

+ 1 more

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A model fitted only to trends in its own outcome cannot forecast anything, because it contains no variable anyone could change.

  Their words

  The demand for explanations of low fertility is entirely a demand for variables which will reduce these technical trends to near zero.

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You can now generate ten thousand variants of a function faster than you could write it once, and that economics pushes software towards replacement rather than repair.

  Their words

  I mean, if you if you think about it, you could generate 10,000 variants of a function faster than you could write it once.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  People who vibe-code a replacement for a product will rebuild the visible tip of the iceberg and then discover the downstream problems they never knew existed.

  Their words

  So, we're going to see people get into those where they're like, "Well, I vibe code the tip of the iceberg. I throw away the rest of the iceberg and now I'm in trouble because now I don't know what to do. Now I get to these downstream problems that I didn't even know existed." So, we're going to see on the on the side of the the the vibe coding replacers, we're going to see that kind of a naivity play out.

  youtube.com

Full-stack Laravel developer based in Madison, Wisconsin; maintains open-source Laravel, Livewire and Alpine.js packages and writes at randallwilk.dev.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Raycast

  Their words

  I've never liked Spotlight on macOS, and previously I used Alfred as a replacement. However, now I've discovered Raycast. Raycast is my primary mode of navigating through macOS, as I've bound the keyboard shortcut to

  randallwilk.dev

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Turkey's sudden fertility collapse after 2013 was caused by a collapse in marriage, not by married couples choosing fewer children.

  Their words

  It just is marriage. Turkish fertility started falling super fast after 2013 because Turkish marriage rates started falling super fast after 2013.

  lymanstone.substack.com

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rust's least mature area is the front end: write the backend in Rust and the front end in TypeScript rather than shipping Rust to the browser through WebAssembly.

  TypeScript

  Their words

  My opinion is that the least mature area is front end. There have been some attempts to compile Rust to Web Assembly and then run it on the web as a front end as a replacement for TypeScript. But if I was writing a web server, I would totally use Rust for the back end and TypeScript for the front end. I would not really go the web assembly route.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Claude

  Their words

  But Claude isn’t just a replacement-level SwiftUI developer. Claude is actually good.

  sockpuppet.org

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The accepted model of how archaic and modern humans relate has been accreted and patched rather than built, and is due for a simpler replacement.

  Their words

  I think that, you know, the model that we've put together collectively about the relationships between archaic and modern humans is sort of accreted over time. There was this, you know, idea that modern humans are distinct and that Neanderthals and Denisovans are like sisters of each other. And then over time we developed and detected additional mixture events like this modern human into Neanderthal and then this other ones I didn't even talk about like super divergent lineage going into Denisovans and like all this other stuff.

  youtube.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hybrid human-plus-AI teams will dominate mathematics for a lot longer, and a full replacement would need breakthroughs beyond anything we now have.

  Their words

  I mean, I I I I do believe that that hybrid um human plus AIs will will dominate mathematics for a lot longer. It it's It will depend It will require some additional breakthroughs uh beyond what we already have.

  youtube.com

Indonesian fullstack engineer, speaker and instructor; writes about JavaScript, SvelteKit and Linux tooling at kalwabed.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  eza

  Their words

  eza: a modern, maintained replacement for ls.

  kalwabed.com

Co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management; author of the Oaktree memos.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI may be a replacement for human cognition rather than a tool, which makes it different in kind from earlier technologies.

  Their words

  AI may not be a tool for mankind, but rather something of a replacement.

  Is It a Bubble?oaktreecapital.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Effective use of AI coding tools requires domain expertise: the tool should be used as an assistant, not as a replacement for the engineer.

  Their words

  This is intentional and I believe good AI drivers are experts in their domains and utilize AI as an assistant, not a replacement.

  Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Featuremitchellh.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI systems are not yet a substitute for real, diverse human experts.

  Their words

  But they can't do everything that megapapers do, such as conveying intellectual heft and legitimacy, and they are not yet a replacement for real, diverse experts.

  Megapapers and How to Write Themmilesbrundage.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Once women control their own fertility they have children only when they expect a reward for it, so the case for parenthood has to compete with everything else on offer.

  Their words

  Once women are in control of their fertility, they only procreate if they expect rewards - whether that is personal fulfillment or social approval.

  How do we Boost Birth Rates?ggd.world

From one piece Why are Marriage & Fertility Plummeting in MENA? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Falling birth rates ended cousin marriage in the Arab world by leaving too few cousins, pushing marriage onto individual choice.

  Their words

  But over the past 50 years, there has been a massive decline in fertility. This entails fewer cousins of a suitable age.

  Why are Marriage & Fertility Plummeting in MENA?ggd.world

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Marriage and birth rates are collapsing across the Middle East and North Africa even though religiosity there has not weakened.

  Their words

  The Middle East, North Africa and Anatolia are witnessing a rapid decline in coupling and fertility. This should rock your priors.

  Why are Marriage & Fertility Plummeting in MENA?ggd.world

From one piece Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Something is broken in how people pair up in the West, and that shortage of couples and marriages, not money, is why there are too few children.

  Their words

  From the 1960s, US fertility fell primarily due to fewer births among couples. In that context, baby bonuses might raise fertility. But today, the major contributing factor is the decline of coupling.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rising female autonomy cannot be the cause of falling birth rates, because births have collapsed just as fast in countries where women's freedom is heavily restricted.

  Their words

  Nicolas Eberstadt speculates that it’s all about rising autonomy. But that can’t explain why fertility has also plummeted in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and India, where women are often heavily restricted.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Paying parents large sums of cash directly is the pronatal policy most likely to work, because every indirect policy has to guess what the real obstacle is.

  Their words

  Similarly, most recent discussions of how to promote fertility discuss how we might promote housing, inequality, schooling, day-care, etc., but few consider directly paying parents big amounts to have kids. As indirect approaches require us to guess what are the actual main obstacles to fertility, they are more likely to fail.

  Five Fertility Failsovercomingbias.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  exa

  Their words

  exa - modern replacement for ls

  mina.codes

Political scientist at the University of Chicago and the leading exponent of offensive realism; wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Removing Putin would not end the war, because whoever replaced him would be more hawkish than he is.

  Russia

  Their words

  My second point is if he doesn't remain in power and he's replaced, I would bet a lot of money that his replacement will be more hawkish and more hard line than Putin is.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The most likely way world fertility rises again is the growth of small insular high-fertility groups, not a change of mind in the mainstream.

  Their words

  the most likely identifiable scenario by which fertility will rise again is via the growth of currently-small insular high-fertility subgroups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews

  A Fertility Reckoningovercomingbias.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The collapse postulate cannot simply be discarded without replacement instructions for measurements.

  Their words

  As we just saw, one cannot just discard the Collapse Postulate. For this reason, if one does calculations in any Many Worlds approach, one must effectively replace the Collapse Postulate by other assumptions, notably about what happens to observers and/or measurement devices when worlds branch.

  Quantum Confusions, Cleared Up (or so I hope)arxiv.org

Economist at the University of Houston; wrote Fully Grown, on why a slow-growing economy is a sign of success, and blogs at Growth Economics.

From one piece Review of DeLong's "Slouching Towards Utopia" 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The fall in fertility deserves equal billing with the research lab, the corporation and globalisation in the story of modern growth.

  Their words

  What I’m nitpicking here is that this decline in fertility deserves equal billing with the research lab, corporation, and globalization.

  Review of DeLong's "Slouching Towards Utopia"growthecon.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The research lab, the corporation and globalisation could not have produced sustained growth without the fall in fertility beside them.

  Their words

  Without this anti-Malthusian response the research lab, corporation, and globalization cannot provide sustained growth.

  Review of DeLong's "Slouching Towards Utopia"growthecon.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Falling fertility is transmitted by the values that mass media spread, not by how rich any individual is.

  Their words

  It seems to be correlated strongly with societal (not individual) wealth, and mediated by norms transmitted via mass media.

  The Insular Fertile Futureovercomingbias.com

Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  VS Code

  Their words

  Every now and again I go searching for a replacement IDE. VSCode came closer than anything else in the last two decades to replacing Vim, but somehow I am back here.

  usesthis.com

London-based front-end architect, web developer evangelist and cloud consultant; Microsoft MVP. Writes at praveen.science and answers on Stack Overflow.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  iTerm2

  Their words

  iTerm 2 (macOS Specific) is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm.

  blog.praveen.science