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Writer on happiness, habits and human nature. Author of The Happiness Project, Better Than Before and The Four Tendencies, and host of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast.

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  An idea stated in a more fluent or rhyming form seems more true or persuasive than the same idea stated plainly.

  Their words

  An idea expressed in rhyme seems more convincing, which is why "Haste makes waste" is more compelling than "Hurrying fosters error."

  How to Tackle a Nagging Task: Power Hour!gretchenrubin.com

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

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  Trying to anticipate what AI will look like two model releases from now is a waste of time and a route to AI psychosis.

  Their words

  Don't try to anticipate anything. You will literally go crazy. Because even the smartest brains in the business cannot anticipate what two model hops from here is going to look like. It's an absolute waste of time, and you will develop an AI psychosis trying to deduce what two years from now is gonna look like. Focus on right now, and right now is the most incredible time to be into computers.

  youtube.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

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  Harry Potter series

  Their words

  Ah, high school memories! Seems like this series was an important part of my childhood.

  rakhim.org

Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.

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  Longer device upgrade cycles are beneficial because they reduce e-waste, pollution, and churn.

  Their words

  But either way, it's good that upgrade cycles are longer: it means less e-waste, less pollution, less churn overall.

  Technology optimism hourmacwright.com

Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

From one piece Carry Q2 2026 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Human-made promotional shilling can be worse than AI-generated junk because real effort was wasted on it.

  Their words

  There has also been an uptick in product shills, which, in some ways is worse than AI stuff-some human actually put effort into making straight garbage.

  Carry Q2 2026everydaycommentary.com

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  Social media has become dominated by low-value AI-generated content.

  Their words

  Social media in general has become a flood of garbage posts either with AI visuals or AI text and all of it has almost no value.

  Carry Q2 2026everydaycommentary.com

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

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  Arguing about whether superintelligence arrives in two years or five is close to a waste of time, because very powerful models are inevitable either way.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  so much of that debate is like I think um in some ways uh a little bit of a waste of time because, you know, I think it's inevitable that we're going to have very powerful models

  youtube.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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  Reading should be treated as cognitive fitness: scheduled daily, with distracting digital media avoided the way we avoid junk food.

  Their words

  We should treat highly distracting digital garbage like junk food – something we largely avoid – and purposefully schedule a non-trivial amount of time each day to read, write, and self-reflect, just as we now dedicate time to walking, jogging, and weight lifting.

  Why Reading Matterscalnewport.com

Head of Instagram since 2018, previously head of Facebook's News Feed.

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  Directing an AI will turn out to be like leading a team: too prescriptive stifles good ideas, too open-ended wastes time going the wrong way.

  Their words

  I believe that if you are too prescriptive as a leader with a team you end up stifling good ideas but if you're too open-ended sometimes teams just waste time um going in the wrong direction.

  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.

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  Building out low-speed regional rail to small towns before intercity rail is fast enough is a waste of money.

  Their words

  further investment in regional rail in New England - by which I mean RegionalBahn-style service to small towns like Westerly and Manchester, not core commuter rail service in Boston to be turned into an S-Bahn - is a waste of money in the current situation.

  Prioritizing Rail Expansion in New Englandpedestrianobservations.com

Makes NeetCode, the structured practice list and video walkthroughs people use to prepare for coding interviews; a former Google engineer.

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  Dismissing a subject as a waste of time because you never used its details on the job is the wrong way to think, and it is the same mistake people make about learning to code now that AI writes the loops.

  Their words

  I think a lot of the things that people might say that like oh, it was a waste of time to learn this subject cuz I didn't actually use like those details on the job. I think that's a very wrong way to think about it. And I think that's what a lot of people are doing now with AI. Like hey, what what if I'm not going to be writing for a loops a couple years from now. Um I don't think those things are a waste of time.

  Tech interviews with NeetCodeyoutube.com

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

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  One-on-one meetings create politics and waste a chief executive's time, and complaints about colleagues should be redirected to the colleague instead.

  Their words

  So I I don't do one-on- ones. My friend Bing told me that Jeff Bezos wouldn't ever do one-on ones because it created politics and it was a huge waste of his time. I was like, I love that. No one ones.

  youtube.com

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

From one piece Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Garbage collection is a problem for backends too, not only for embedded code: a collection that lands on an incoming request is a latency spike.

  Their words

  Even for back end, it can be a problem because if you have a request incoming right when it checks all of your objects like you have some sort of latency spike where you it takes much longer to to reply. So that's one of the reasons it can be helpful in in back end as well.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

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  What is unique about Rust is not any one feature but the combination: high-level reliability with no garbage collector, so it runs in kernels and firmware.

  Linux

  Their words

  I think where Rust is really unique is in the combination of things. So on one hand, it it doesn't have a garbage collector and it it's usable in low-level context like the Linux kernel or firmware or whatever.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

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

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  The internet is already past peak truth, and picking out training data worth learning from will only get harder.

  Their words

  I mean, you could argue that we we're already past peak truth on the on the on the internet, right? And now there's there's just more and more garbage every every day. It gets harder and harder to suss out the stuff that you do want to include in the training set in order to actually make something more intelligent.

  youtube.com

Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.

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  Data centres mostly take farmland, of which America has too much, rather than housing land, of which it has too little.

  data centersAmerica

  Their words

  This post is about whether data centers waste the land they’re on relative to what they compete with, and my claim is that they mostly don’t compete with things we need more of (housing) and mostly compete with things we need less of (farmland).

  Data center land use issues are fakeblog.andymasley.com

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  A skill goes to waste only when insecurity or outside pressure stops someone from pursuing it, not merely by going unused.

  Their words

  It only goes to waste if you would find joy and meaning in using it, but you don't because of insecurity or outside voices.

  How to find your passion in lifemariandrew.substack.com

Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.

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  Widespread AI-driven performance tuning agents will meaningfully reduce global energy waste.

  energy

  Their words

  In future there will be AI performance agents that can be run on everything, helping to save the planet by reducing energy usage.

  On "AI Brendans" or "Virtual Brendans"brendangregg.com

Chairman and chief executive of Microsoft since 2014; joined the company in 1992 and ran its cloud business before that.

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  Infrastructure optimised for a single model is one architectural breakthrough away from being worthless.

  Their words

  You can't build an infrastructure that's optimized for one model. If you do that what if you go fall behind? In fact, all the infrastructure you built will be a waste, right?

  Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGIyoutube.com

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

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  The value of an ambitious experiment target is not hitting it but the conversation about what would have to be true to hit it.

  Their words

  And a thousand experiments by itself, like if you just did that, but you didn't learn, you didn't make an impact, and that's kind of a waste of time, right? The whole point of setting a goal is that you can have conversations about what would need to be true to actually hit that goal.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and chief investment officer of Cambria Investment Management. He has written several books on quantitative asset allocation, blogs at Meb Faber Research and hosts The Meb Faber Show.

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  Being Right or Making Money

  Their words

  Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman

  mebfaber.com

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  The Silver Bears

  Their words

  Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman

  mebfaber.com

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  Triumph of the Optimists

  Their words

  Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman

  mebfaber.com

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  2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow

  Their words

  Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman

  mebfaber.com

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  The Art of the Market

  Their words

  Here’s a list of great investing books that somehow have fewer than 50 reviews! Being Right or Making Money by Ned Davis The Art of the Market by Bob Tamarkin and Les Krantz Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton 2020 Vision: Investment wisdom for tomorrow by Harry Liem The Silver Bears by Paul Emil Erdman

  mebfaber.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  Waste Books

  Their words

  Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.

  sive.rs

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

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  Tests written by a model in the same context as the change are what find the bugs; the automated tests left behind are the lesser product.

  Their words

  Bigger changes always get tests. Automated ones usually aren’t great, but the model almost always finds issues when you ask it to write tests IN THE SAME CONTEXT. Context is precious, don’t waste it.

  My Current AI Dev Workflowsteipete.me

Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.

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  Sparse autoencoders are a useful interpretability tool but are often used wastefully when a simpler, more obvious method would work as well or better

  Their words

  I'm more agnostic about the best techniques, things like sparse autoencoders are a useful tool, but easy to waste effort using when a simpler method is sufficient or better - start by doing the obvious thing!

  MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29)neelnanda.io

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 coding agent left to run over a weekend returns work that is half good, a quarter garbage and a quarter in need of repair.

  Their words

  And it came back and half of them were great, a quarter of them were total garbage and a quarter needed some work. But like it was, you know, in a way him working the entire weekend with, you know, guidance from him.

  youtube.com

Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.

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  When Harry Met Sally

  Their words

  On the other hand, seeing When Harry Met Sally at the Roxie was a total delight. I was grinning for probably 80% of it.

  jasmi.news

Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.

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  Pillow Book

  Their words

  A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.

  escapingflatland.substack.com

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  Conquest of the Useless

  Their words

  A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.

  escapingflatland.substack.com

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  Pensées

  Their words

  A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.

  escapingflatland.substack.com

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  Carnets

  Their words

  A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.

  escapingflatland.substack.com

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  Brown and Blue Notebooks

  Their words

  A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.

  escapingflatland.substack.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.

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  The Kardashev ladder ignores the second law: harvesting a planet's worth of energy produces waste heat that changes the planet's climate.

  energy

  Their words

  There's the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn't thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don't get to use it all.

  youtube.com

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  C# in Depth

  Their words

  C# is the language I probably understood down to the nitty-gritty details. Just when I thought myself of being an expert - knowing all that is to know on memory allocation, garbage collection, LINQ - I read this book. It made me realize how many things I did not know.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.

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  The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading.

  Their words

  What is out there is buried among ever-growing piles of useless content farm material or, increasingly, AI-generated garbage.

  Fighting for our webcitationneeded.news

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The largest contribution physics can make to AI is energy efficiency: computers waste heat hilariously worse than brains do, and nobody has seriously tried to fix it.

  energy

  Their words

  I think this is one of the biggest things that physics can help with, and it’s an obvious kind of low-hanging fruit situation where the heat generation, the inefficiency, the waste of existing high-level computers is nowhere near the efficiency of our brains. It’s hilariously worse, and we haven’t tried to optimize that hard on that frontier.

  youtube.com

Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.

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  Even the most commercially successful books are written for a very small group of people rather than for everyone.

  Their words

  Uh Harry Potter, the most successful uh book franchise in history, it made the author over a billion dollars. That book is for almost no one. Right? That book is for precocious 12-year-olds and people who like to remember what was like to be a precocious 12-year-old. That's not everyone. That's a very small group of people.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

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  Obviousness comes from conforming to people's existing mental models: do not reinvent a common UI pattern unless the new one is at least twice as good.

  Their words

  Obviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.

  lg.substack.com

Designer, architect and scientist, who led the Mediated Matter group at MIT and founded OXMAN, a company that builds products in collaboration with living organisms.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Calling a fragrance bio-derived says nothing about what it cost nature: ten thousand rose bushes are burned through to make five millilitres of it.

  Their words

  But when you look into the fragrance and you understand that in order to get to this bio-derived fragrance, you blew through 10,000 bushes of rose to create 5 mL of a rose fragrance. And all these 10,000 bushes of rose, they take space, they take water management, and so much waste.

  youtube.com

American author of The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy and Stillness Is the Key. Writes the Reading List book-recommendation email (started 2008) and owns The Painted Porch bookstore in Bastrop, Texas. Hosts The Daily Stoic podcast.

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  Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman

  Their words

  this one is one of the best leadership books I have ever read

  ryanholiday.net

Biochemist at University College London; writes about the origin of life and the role of energy in evolution, in The Vital Question and Transformer.

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  Oxygenic photosynthesis was the single greatest pollution event in the whole history of the Earth.

  Their words

  So you’re using the power of the sun to split water, take out the hydrogen, stick it onto CO2, and the oxygen is a waste product and you just throw it out, throw it away. So it’s the single greatest planetary pollution event in the whole history of the earth.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

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  REWORK

  Their words

  The team at 37 Signals have very strong opinions on how to build a company and much of it is solid advice to consider. This book is particularly great because it's a simple, quick read; they do not waste your time with fluff.

  jasonevanish.com

Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Face-to-face meetings are not inherently better than other forms of communication and can waste time just like anything else.

  Their words

  face-to-face meetings are not inherently better. They can be time wasters just like anything else.

  thorstenball.com

Writer and developer; runs Waxy.org, co-organises the XOXO festival, and was the first CTO of Kickstarter.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Thunderbolt Display

  Their words

  When I'm home, I keep it plugged into a 27" Thunderbolt Display, because my eyes are garbage.

  usesthis.com

From one piece Digital pollution 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Generators emit thousands of lines where ten would do, and that waste is why people think their phone is slow.

  Their words

  These programs that generate a website, app, or file for you spit out thousands of lines of unnecessary junk when really only 10 lines are needed.

  Digital pollutionsive.rs

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Code and files generated by tools are pollution: hand-writing them is worth the effort because the bloat slows everything down for everyone.

  Their words

  I prefer coding everything by hand, because I don't like the huge piles of garbage that the automated generators create.

  Digital pollutionsive.rs

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Full formal verification is a waste of money for most software: near-perfect is reachable with ordinary techniques at a fraction of the cost.

  Their words

  You do not need full code verification to write good software or even to write near-perfect software.

  Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?hillelwayne.com