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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

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

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

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.

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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

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  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

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

+ 2 more

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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

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  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

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.

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  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

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