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Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The current capabilities of existing AI models are barely being used and are often not even well understood.

  Their words

  My point is that, while there is a lot of debate over what future models will do, the current capabilities of existing models are barely being used, and are often not even well understood.

  The Overhangoneusefulthing.org

Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A U.S.-Canada trade war would cost the U.S. a great deal of time and money to absorb, and is not a trivial disruption Americans would barely notice.

  America

  Their words

  Yes — but it would be expensive and take a great deal of time. In short, if Trump, Bessent and company think that trade conflict with Canada is a trivial issue, one that Americans will barely notice, they’re in for a rude awakening.

  Adding Injury to Insult, Canada Editionpaulkrugman.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hand-optimizing hot spots barely matters any more, because the libraries are already fast and CPUs are extremely good at running bad code quickly; what is left is architecture.

  Their words

  One of the reasons that you don't see hotspot optimization as a thing that really matters that much anymore and one of the reasons I advise that architecture and and not making bad decisions is much more important is because a lot of libraries already have been optimized for you that you might use.

  youtube.com

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

From one piece Do Religious Families Actually Have More Kids? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Religion barely explains how many children an American family has.

  America

  Their words

  Yes, religion does seem to have an impact on the decision about the number of kids a family will have, but it’s a very minor difference.

  Do Religious Families Actually Have More Kids?graphsaboutreligion.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  American family size has barely changed across three generations of parents; what has grown is the share who stop at one child.

  America

  Their words

  Among the Silent Generation (born 1925–1945), only 15% of parents had a single child. It was 22% of Boomers and 27% of Generation X.

  Do Religious Families Actually Have More Kids?graphsaboutreligion.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Very few developers understand memory management, and that is why the state of the art in memory debugging has barely moved in years.

  Their words

  I would say, sometimes, I don't know if it's controversial, that very few developers understand memory management. And that makes it even harder to debug memory problems. And so the state of the art around memory debugging hasn't evolved all that much over the years.

  youtube.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Staged, controlled rollout of a powerful AI model provides little safety benefit once open-weight versions of similar capability are inevitably released.

  Their words

  At the end of the day, this type of safety barely matters when true open-weights are coming.

  interconnects.ai

Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Anthropic or OpenAI's revenue could equal or exceed the combined revenue of Elon Musk's public companies within the next one to two years.

  AnthropicOpenAI

  Their words

  it's not out of the question that Anthropic or OpenAI-which barely had any revenue before 2023-could equal or surpass the revenue of all of Musk's public companies some time in the next 12 to 24 months.

  derekthompson.org

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every AI hype cycle produces spectacular demos and very few products, because each breakthrough makes the demo far easier and the tail barely easier.

  Their words

  And that's why every hype cycle produces a wave of absolutely spectacular demos and very few real products. And the recurring mistake of every cycle is spending on the demo when you should be saving for the nines.

  youtube.com

Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Deciding on averages is how product teams destroy the small group for whom a barely-used feature is everything.

  Their words

  there are real downstream impacts to people's businesses that often come from just like a lack of nuance in understanding metrics, particularly averages.

  youtube.com

Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The world is barely ready for this technology, and the people building it have a responsibility to prepare the world rather than only to ship.

  Their words

  you know, the world is like really just, you know, barely even ready for this technology today. And I think, you know, as a builder, we have a responsibility to prepare the world, right?

  youtube.com

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We are near the bottom of the tech tree, not the top; even the list of phases of matter keeps growing and we are starting to design new ones.

  Their words

  And this looks to me like, oh, we're down at sort of the bottom of the tech tree. We've barely gotten started there.

  youtube.com

Austrian developer. Created the libGDX game framework, and more recently the pi coding agent, which moved with them to Earendil — Armin Ronacher's company — in April 2026. Writes at mariozechner.at.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Agentic code search has recall that falls as a codebase grows, so the agent does not find the code it needs -- and which search tool you give it barely matters.

  Their words

  You can give it a Bash tool so it can ripgrep its way through the codebase. You can give it some queryable codebase index, an LSP server, a vector database. In the end it doesn't matter much. The bigger the codebase, the lower the recall. Low recall means that your agent will, in fact, not find all the code it needs to do a good job.

  Thoughts on slowing the fuck downmariozechner.at

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Given the current pace of AI capabilities relative to governance, society will at best avoid only the worst-case outcomes, not the merely very bad ones.

  Their words

  We need to accept that at best, we will just barely avoid some of the worst case scenarios (e.g., an AI-enabled biological weapon that kills billions, a rogue AI takeover, or stable global totalitarianism enabled by AI), given the current pace of AI capabilities relative to the pace of governance.

  We're in Triage Mode for AI Policymilesbrundage.substack.com

Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits

  Their words

  Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits (in Milk Caramel Sea Salt and Cookie Mix), which single-handedly got me through this work year. I shudder to think how many bags of these I ate, but I can barely finish an essay without one.

  haleynahman.substack.com

American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Moana

  Their words

  And in fact, I do like Moana very much. It’s my favorite film out of Disney Animated Studios in the last decade, and even (barely) edges out Coco when you include Pixar in the mix

  whatever.scalzi.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Framework Desktop

  Their words

  It's an incredible machine, but in the day-to-day, I've actually found I barely notice the difference compared to a $500 mini PC from Beelink

  world.hey.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Film found its modern form by 1939 and has barely changed since; games are nowhere near that point and still have a long way to go.

  Their words

  Basically, a modern film is no different from a 1939 film. But with games, I still think we’ve got a long way to go.

  youtube.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Humans barely use reinforcement learning for intelligence — what RL they do use goes into motor tasks, not problem solving.

  Their words

  a lot of what looks like learning is actually a lot more maturation of the brain and I think that actually very little reinforcement learning for animals and I think a lot of the reinforcement learning is actually like more like motor tasks. It's not intelligence tasks. So I actually kind of think humans don't actually like really use RL roughly speaking is what I would say.

  youtube.com

Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A major new interface redesign takes roughly a year of refinement before it looks presentable.

  Their words

  Liquid Glass is currently in a barely presentable state on iOS. It's going to be like iOS 7 and take another year to sand down the rough edges.

  One Size Does Not Fit Allfurbo.org

Pseudonymous writer; posts careful, funny investigations of everyday questions — air quality, seed oils, arguing, chess — usually by reading the studies.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  A vastly superhuman intelligence would still not be able to talk people out of their beliefs, because humans are barely persuadable.

  Their words, before

  I suspect that if you decided to be open-minded, then the Being would probably be extremely persuasive. But I don’t think it’s very common to do that.

  Their words now

  I take it back. Instead of being unsure, I now lean strongly towards the idea that the Being would in fact be very good at convincing people of stuff, and far better than any human.

Co-founder of the AI agent company Sierra, and previously an eighteen-year Google executive who ran product for Workspace, virtual and augmented reality, and Google Labs.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A company working at the edge of the barely possible has to control its own technology destiny, even at the application layer.

  Their words

  This kind of zone of the barely doable, it's super important that to the largest extent possible, you be able to kind of control your own technology destiny.

  youtube.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ten cents of electricity generates a thousand dollars of economic value in AI, so the price of power barely matters to the labs.

  energy

  Their words

  well their cost of serving it is is like maybe a buck per million tokens or something like that and the cost of electricity is about 10% of that. So it's like 10 cents of electricity is generating $1,000 worth of economic value.

  youtube.com

Fellow at the Manhattan Institute writing on crime, drugs and policing; writes The Causal Fallacy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Drug enforcement cut casual use and barely touched heavy users, who account for most of the drugs consumed.

  Addiction

  Their words

  But by the available evidence, the War on Drugs was far less successful at reducing use among the “hard core” of users, mostly meaning people addicted to their drug of choice.

  What Was The War on Drugs? Part Vthecausalfallacy.substack.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Past a point it is cheaper to overbuild solar than to add batteries, because a battery kept for the rare bad day is barely used.

  solar

  Their words

  A battery that’s discharging every day gets great utilization, but one that’s only there in case the sun doesn’t come up for two days in a row, barely gets used.

  Solar and batteries for generic use casescaseyhandmer.wordpress.com