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Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Expecting a layoff in advance provides little psychological protection against its effects.

  AI and jobs

  Their words

  Being mentally prepared didn't provide much protection. The effects of job loss looked remarkably similar.

  Your Job Gives You More Than Moneyrobkhenderson.com

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.

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  If AI hardware depreciates faster than assumed, the economics of the debt-financed AI capex boom invert and today's leverage turns reckless.

  Their words

  If the useful life of an NVIDIA H100-vintage cluster turns out to really be three years rather than six, the capex cycle's economics invert, and the leverage that looked prudent looks reckless.

  braddelong.substack.com

Software engineer and engineering leader at Canonical, working on Ubuntu; writes about his homelab, Nix and tooling at jnsgr.uk.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Tailscale

  Their words

  In 2021 I started using Tailscale in place of my hand-rolled Wireguard setup, and I haven’t looked back. It has to be one of my favourite pieces of technology ever.

  jnsgr.uk

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Graphics have stopped selling games: most of the market by revenue no longer cares how a game looks, so new games now compete with the entire back catalogue.

  Their words

  But a large portion of the gaming market by revenue doesn't really care what the game looked like all that much uh in a sense that whatever we're doing today is good enough. So 10 years from now if the games look much better for some reason no one will really think of that as a huge differentiation differentiator in terms of sales.

  youtube.com

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

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  Ambition does not equate with happiness: in the Harvard aging cohort it was the people who lived average lives who reported being happiest.

  ambition

  Their words

  But when they looked at the happiness levels of these people, it was the average person who actually would self-report the highest levels of happiness. So ambition doesn't necessarily equate with happiness, which I think many people would agree with with that.

  youtube.com

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.

From one piece Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Drawing the printer as it really looked shortened the icon's life; stopping sooner and drawing something simpler would have made it last.

  Their words

  But again, too much detail. It would have had a much longer lifespan if I had just stopped and made it simpler.

  youtube.com

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  An application icon and its document icon should read as a verb and a noun: the tool looks active, and the document resembles the tool.

  Their words

  and I like the idea that since it was a process it looked kind of active and um and then it could be paired with a document that resembled it so our system was kind of a verb and a noun

  youtube.com

Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

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  The numbers an AI engineer should know by heart are memory bandwidths and the energy cost of a single operation.

  energy

  Their words

  Yeah, I mean I think if you looked at what is important in AI systems these days, you would want to know things like the bandwidth between you know your main memory system on your accelerator to the onchip memory to the um you know the multiplier unit or whatever. You want to know how much energy does it take to do a single multiplier operation.

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

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  The AI shock to engineering is an acceleration of a change that has been running for decades, not a break from it.

  Their words

  It feels like it's a it's an acceleration of how much engineering has changed. But if you looked over the last 10 years or 20 years you would say the same thing.

  youtube.com

General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.

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  Venture capital bends toward the young, because the work is a hustle and later-life obligations cap how many hours anyone can give it.

  startups

  Their words

  I think the the whole industry bends towards youth for that reason and because it's a hustle business like there there's there's always a rock you haven't looked under and you know age brings children and homes and and and other requirements you get tied to and responsibilities and you're just not able to go spend 80 hours a week studying YouTube like you just can't.

  youtube.com

Programmer and writer known for detailed source code reviews of classic game engines, and author of the Game Engine Black Book series on Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

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  Multimedia design succeeds by building up from a platform's real hardware constraints rather than compressing full video down to fit them

  Their words

  Most FMV games looked bad because developers followed a top-down approach trying to cram a real movie into a tiny CD-ROM using a weak CPU.

  The art and engineering of Silpheedfabiensanglard.net

Founder and editor of ToolGuyd, a tool review site covering power tools, hand tools, workshop equipment and EDC gear. He writes under his first name on the site.

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  Synergy Alpha Elite dumbbell rack

  Their words

  Summary: Shipping damage. Residue on some of the components. Loud pings and pops from the assembled weight rack. A design that looked great and saved space but was painfully unusable. Restocking fee. Non-refunded shipping fees. Ghosted me about the refund.

  toolguyd.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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  Not one of the companies building frontier AI is willing to accept standard corporate governance, which is how dangerous they know the technology to be.

  Their words

  I looked down the panel and I realized not a single one of these companies has standard governance. That's how bad it is.

  youtube.com

Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.

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  "Too expensive" is never the real reason a customer cancels, because they already decided the price was acceptable when they bought.

  Their words

  And that is never ever ever the reason. How do I know? Because they already looked at your homepage, read all the stuff, saw what you promised, looked at the pricing page, and decided to buy it.

  youtube.com

Indian technology consultant and writer. Former editor of Beautiful Pixels; writes about Apple hardware and Mac software at nuclearbits.com.

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  Pixelmator Pro

  Their words

  is an Incredible image & photo editor. I switched to it completely from Photoshop about a year ago and haven’t looked back.

  nuclearbits.com

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  Photoshop

  Their words

  is an Incredible image & photo editor. I switched to it completely from Photoshop about a year ago and haven’t looked back.

  nuclearbits.com

Technology analyst whose weekly email on tech reaches over 150,000 readers. Publishes essays and an annual presentation on where the industry is going.

From one piece Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evans 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Cars are becoming Android with no iPhone, which makes Tesla just another handset maker rather than the premium platform owner.

  Their words

  The interesting Tesla point is people always looked at it and said, "It's the iPhone of cars." No, it's not. What's happening is that cars are becoming Android with no iPhone. And then Tesla is just selling and is is in that metaphor Tesla is just another android phone maker

  youtube.com

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  Incumbents have looked unbeatable at the start of every previous platform shift and have still lost.

  Google

  Their words

  I'm pretty sure people thought Microsoft had an advantage on the internet and Google and um Meta had an advantage on mobile and everyone thought IBM was going to win PCs. Like once IBM made a PC, that was it. It's all over now. And we kind of forget that like there were PCs before and then IBM made one and that kind of became the standard but then IBM lost it.

  youtube.com

Software engineer and engineering leader at Canonical, working on Ubuntu; writes about his homelab, Nix and tooling at jnsgr.uk.

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  Zellij

  Their words

  Finally: tmux, which I had been happily using for many years, but slowly collecting configuration for. I decided to give Zellij a try, and haven’t looked back.

  jnsgr.uk

Historian of the Second World War; wrote Normandy '44 and Brothers in Arms, and co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast.

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  The familiar narrative of the war — useless Britain, the world's best German army beaten only because Hitler was mad — is an artefact of how the world looked in the 1970s and 1980s, not of how it looked in 1939.

  America

  Their words

  And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.

  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 progress is faster than people expect, and ordinary scaling can be enough to solve problems that looked very hard.

  Their words

  GPT-2, R1, and nearly every other AI model released since 2018 have all been part of a consistent story: AI capabilities that rival and ultimately exceed human intelligence are easier and cheaper to build than almost anyone can intuitively grasp, and this gets easier and cheaper every month.

  The Real Lesson of DeepSeek's R1milesbrundage.substack.com

Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ayn Rand's strangeness was both her strength and her undoing, because she used herself as the model of humanity and never grasped how unlike other people she was.

  Their words

  That was her strength because she's so unusual, but it was also her downfall because she looked to herself as a model or to get insight about humanity, and she never quite processed how different she was from other people.

  youtube.com

Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Electric cars will not reach 30% of US sales by 2027; the forecasts that looked pessimistic in 2018 were still too optimistic.

  Their words

  Q3 2024 had the rate 8.9% so there is no way it can reach 30% in 2027. I was way too optimistic at a time when EV enthusiasts thought I was horribly pessimistic.

  Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01rodneybrooks.com

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

From one piece Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Every SETI search ever conducted adds up to sampling a hot tub's worth of an ocean, so finding nothing tells us nothing.

  Their words

  And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it

  youtube.com

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  There is no Fermi paradox from the great silence: nobody has looked, for the entirely mundane reason that nobody funded the search.

  Their words

  So, we'll call that the indirect Fermi paradox and there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There's never been any money to look.

  youtube.com

Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.

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  If a lost Ice Age civilisation existed, its traces lie in the Sahara, the Amazon and the drowned continental shelves — the habitable places archaeology has barely looked at.

  Their words

  The places to look are places that were hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the ice age. That, of course, includes the coastlines that are now underwater. Of course, it includes the Sahara Desert. Of course, it includes the Amazon rainforest as well.

  youtube.com

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

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  The Maya built their sacred calendar out of the human gestation period: they looked into their bodies rather than up at the sky.

  Their words

  I mean, if that’s right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together, when they thought about, “We need a count of time for us,” they didn’t look up into the heavens, they looked into their bodies. “What’s the first cycle that we actually go through as humans?” and they picked this nine-month thing. It really is our cycle, and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.

  youtube.com

Neuroscientist at UC Davis; studies memory and wrote Why We Remember.

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  Torture and enhanced interrogation produce what the interrogator wants to hear rather than what happened, because stress shuts down the machinery that checks a memory's accuracy.

  Their words

  And from what I understand, the research actually shows that they just produce what people want to hear, not necessarily the information that is being looked for.

  youtube.com

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

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  AI progress is faster than people expect, and ordinary scaling can be enough to solve problems that looked very hard.

  Their words

  This rapid scaleup will probably drive another qualitative leap forward in capability like what we saw over the last 18 months.

  Language models surprised usplanned-obsolescence.org

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

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  AI progress is faster than people expect, and ordinary scaling can be enough to solve problems that looked very hard.

  Their words

  I think this matches the general finding that AI progress is faster than expected, and increases my certainty that scale and normal progress can sometimes be enough to solve even very difficult problems.

  astralcodexten.substack.com

American software engineer; worked on code-server at Coder and teaches TypeScript and open-source contribution. Publishes at joeprevite.com.

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  iTerm2

  Their words

  I use iTerm2. A friend told me about it a while ago. I switched to it and haven't looked back.

  joeprevite.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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  Apollo 11

  Their words

  It's well worth a watch, to see what it looked like at the time, but I also found it almost anticlimactic to watch: With the benefit of history there's no real uncertainty or tension about what will happen, and the format gives the viewer disappointingly little "behind-the-scenes" insight into just what it took to make the mission go off

  blog.nelhage.com