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British front-end web developer based in Japan; writes about HTML, CSS, web performance and browser tooling at christianoliff.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  BrowserStack

  Their words

  BrowserStack Cross-device testing

  christianoliff.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  People treat an unresponsive interface exactly the way they treat a slow pedestrian crossing: they keep hitting the button.

  Their words

  Humans are humans are are shockingly simple, you know, uh, if you think about the experience you have with somebody that's just trying to cross the street, if, uh, you know, if the light doesn't turn, you know, doesn't say they can walk fast enough, they'll just keep hitting that button. That's the same experience they have on the internet.

  youtube.com

Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Demand for inference may be growing exponentially while GPU production can only grow linearly, and the tightening happens where those two lines cross.

  Their words

  The demand for inference is growing. So, like I don't think it's linearly growing. I think it might even be exponentially growing. But we haven't made our production of GPUs grow exponentially. That's like kind of a linear process. So as those lines intersect, there's going to be uh tightening.

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com

Danish software engineer and Microsoft technical fellow, creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi and lead architect of C# and TypeScript.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The language that actually delivered write-once-run-anywhere was not Java but JavaScript, because every new device turned out to ship a browser.

  JavaScript

  Their words

  but lo and behold, they all run browsers with JavaScript in it. Lo and behold, the real cross-platform language isn't Java. It's JavaScript.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, which he started in 2011 while studying product design at Stanford.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Listing out your jobs to be done is how a company brings order to AI, because it shows exactly where an agent belongs and what it should improve.

  Their words

  by listing out all these jobs to be done, you know, really for the for the community journey and for advertisers as well, it became very clear where we could use agents, where we needed to be very focused in terms of building cross-functional teams around those jobs supported by AI tools.

  youtube.com

Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A distributed system must assume there is no upper bound whatsoever on how long a message can take to cross the network.

  Their words

  we just assume that there's no upper bound on how long it might take for a message to go over the network. So, you send a message, it might arrive within 100 microseconds, or it might take 10 years.

  youtube.com

Freelance research analyst and writer of the blog Aceso Under Glass, known for 'epistemic spot checks' of non-fiction claims.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Venture capital culture and evangelical church-planting culture don't just resemble each other, they actively borrow from and influence each other.

  startups

  Their words

  The link between venture capital and evangelical Christianity was closer than I thought. They're not just analogous; they deliberately cross-pollinate.

  Church Planting: Lessons from the Commentsacesounderglass.com

Chilean web engineer building web experiences since 2006; co-founder of Media Creators and writes at iolivares.com.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  1Password

  Their words

  The best cross-platform security service.

  iolivares.com

Professor of economics at George Mason University and Bartley J. Madden Chair at the Mercatus Center. Co-writes the blog Marginal Revolution and co-authors the textbook Modern Principles of Economics with Tyler Cowen.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Corner allocations under price ceilings are a distinct source of cross-market misallocation, separate from Harberger quantity loss and within-market misallocation.

  Their words

  These corner allocations create a distinct source of cross-market misallocation, separate from the aggregate quantity loss (the Harberger triangle) and from within-market misallocation emphasized in prior work.

  arxiv.org

Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  A House of Dynamite

  Their words

  A House of Dynamite. A very tough watch, but I thought this was fantastic as a tour of some of the different kinds of people who hold the fate of every single person on the planet in their hands every damn day. They’re tired, stressed, distracted, at cross-purposes with themselves, set in their ways, more celebs than leaders, and mediocre. And none of them have ever seen Dr. Strangelove? (A)

  kottke.org

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Richer countries have fewer children than poor ones, but within a country a boom raises births and a bust lowers them.

  Their words

  Although the cross-sectional relationship between national income and fertility is negative, the longitudinal relationship between national income and fertility is positive: economic booms create baby booms, economic busts create baby busts.

  Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Education can raise how much everyone knows, but it almost never changes who is ahead of whom.

  Their words

  Decades of grading data; standardized test scores; cross-sectional, longitudinal, observational, and experimental studies; along with many other types of ancillary and convergent evidence, ultimately tell the same story: education can raise the absolute performance of most students modestly, but it almost never meaningfully reshuffles the relative distribution of ability and achievement

  Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The total fertility rate is a culturally biased measure, because societies substitute between abortion, infanticide and contraception to reach the same family size.

  Their words

  Thus, TFR as an indicator is cross-culturally biased by social preferences between infanticide and abortion, child neglect and abortion, etc.

  There Is No Long Decline in Fertilitylymanstone.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The time between deciding to cross a dangerous AI capability threshold and actually crossing it could be extremely short, even seconds.

  Their words

  With AI, breakout times could conceivably be very short - it could be hours, minutes, or even seconds for some very specific but important change to occur.

  milesbrundage.substack.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  As software projects grow more numerous, fast-moving, and interdependent, cross-project regressions become practically inevitable.

  Their words

  However, with so many different software projects out there, each moving so rapidly and depending on and being used by so many other projects, it becomes practically-inevitable that some regressions "like that one" happen, almost constantly.

  blog.nelhage.com

Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Marriage survives in South Asia because families arrange it and divorce is taboo, not because men and women mix more freely there.

  Their words

  Thus, even if cross-gender friendships are few and far between, South Asian families still consolidate and preserve nuptials.

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

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  "Simplify onboarding" is an action, not a problem, and a roadmap line written that way will not work.

  Their words

  But, if you ever have a line item on your roadmap that says simplify onboarding, please please cross it out. It's not going to work because simplifying onboarding is an action.

  youtube.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  High infrastructure costs are not Baumol's cost disease: what a country pays per kilometre of subway barely tracks how rich it is.

  Their words

  In fact, even though growth in average infrastructure costs over time is documented, there is very little cross-national correlation between GDP per capita and per-km subway construction costs.

  pedestrianobservations.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Asking when AGI will arrive is a poorly formed question; the answerable question is when a system will be able to do a particular capability.

  AGI

  Their words

  I used to love to speculate on that question. I have realized since that I think it’s very poorly formed, and that people use extremely different definitions for what AGI is. So I think it makes more sense to talk about when we’ll build systems that can do capability X or Y or Z, rather than when we fuzzily cross this one mile marker.

  youtube.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Scaling up GPT will never produce AGI, because a model trained on cross-entropy loss cannot get there; reinforcement learning in rich environments is required.

  AGI

  Their words

  When I talked about will GPT12 be AGI, my answer is no. Of course not. I mean, cross-entropy loss is never going to get you there. You need probably RL in fancy environments in order to get something that would be considered AGI-like.

  youtube.com

Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Software development is separated from engineering by circumstance rather than essence, and most programmers could cross that gap without retraining.

  Their words

  We are separated from engineering by circumstance, not by essence, and we can choose to bridge that gap at will.

  Are We Really Engineers?hillelwayne.com