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Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  If existing model companies slow down, starting a new model company becomes slightly more feasible.

  Their words

  If the model companies are all going to slow down, this makes it slightly more feasible to start a new model company.

  @paulg on Xx.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

  Open-source AI's future is uncertain because building frontier models is extremely capital-intensive.

  Their words

  Open-source AI has a tricky future, as building the best models is extremely capital intensive.

  Teaching Everyone to Fish for Tokensinterconnects.ai

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Yelling and nagging at children produces compliance in the moment but costs tension, sulking, and guilt.

  Their words

  Yelling and nagging may seem effective in the moment ("I'm getting them to put on their shoes!"), but the cost is tension, sulking, and guilt.

  gretchenrubin.com

Chief executive of Intel since 2025, founder of the venture firm Walden International and chief executive of Cadence Design Systems for thirteen years.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI factories and foundries are too capital-intensive for venture money; they need government or sovereign funds behind them.

  government

  Their words

  And then in terms of the capital intensive like AI in a factory and also the foundry and then you really need to tap either government funding or some sovereign fund

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Proxy advisers judge companies by rule-compliance rather than shareholder interest, because they grew out of fraud prevention.

  Their words

  they started from a place of corporate governance where they were looking out for fraud. And so so risk mitigation rather than shareholder interest. And so when you come at it from that perspective, you're like, there should be rules and people should adhere to the rules and when people get outside of the rules, that's bad.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Formal verification is about to become economical, because models are getting good enough at writing the proofs that humans no longer have to.

  LLMs

  Their words

  One is that the LLMs are getting increasingly good at writing these proofs. And if we don't have to write the proof by hand as humans, it just becomes feasible to do them in situations where previously it would have not been economical.

  youtube.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A technology being right is never enough on its own: whether it wins turns on whether the world is ready for it and whether the economics work at that moment.

  Their words

  It's not about just a technology. It's about whether the world is ready for it, whether it's economically feasible.

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Manufacturing and mining in space will never be lucrative enough to pay for human settlement of space.

  Their words, before

  Furthermore, I believe it’s very unlikely that space-based manufacturing or mining could be lucrative enough to fund the venture.

  Their words now

  Today, exploding demand for power-intensive AI applications provides enough of an upside to justify producing components in space, providing the economic engine necessary to justify and fund the trillions of dollars necessary to build and sustain space factories.

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Without agreed rules of the road, AI companies and states will tend to cut corners on safety and compliance commitments.

  Their words

  Companies and countries are tempted to cut corners by default and would benefit from some rules of the road, at least if they're sure others will follow those rules.

  Some Recent Stuff I Wrotemilesbrundage.substack.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

  Tablets will not replace desktop computers for complex, resource-intensive professional work.

  Their words

  So while iPadOS has obviously gotten more capable, I don't see it displacing the Mac desktop as the place where the heavy lifting gets done.

  One Size Does Not Fit Allfurbo.org

Philosopher at Oxford; co-founded effective altruism and 80,000 Hours, wrote Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, and now works on what a good future would actually contain.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We should act on the assumption that we have almost no idea what the best futures would look like, so committing today to any particular vision would be a great mistake.

  Their words

  Given how much moral progress we should hope to make in the future, and how much we’ll learn about what’s even empirically possible, we should act on the assumption that we have almost no idea what the best feasible futures would look like. Committing today to some particular vision would be a great mistake.

  Introducing Better Futuresforethought.org

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Designing Data-Intensive Applications

  Their words

  The most practical book I've found so far on distributed systems.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Vertical farming swaps a land problem for an energy problem, and the energy cost is what stops it feeding the world.

  energy

  Their words

  What stands in the way is energy demand. Growing crops indoors is energy-intensive. So we’re really swapping a land problem for an energy one.

  hannahritchie.substack.com

Economist writing on why technological progress slowed and what would restart it — energy, supersonic flight, housing and the regulations around them.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  A large cargo airship is probably not fundable as a startup, because it stays capital-intensive and risky until late in development.

  startups

  Their words, before

  My suggested approach would be more capital intensive while retaining a lot of risk until fairly late in development. I am not sure it’s fundable.

  Their words now

  Cargo airship margins, therefore, can be much higher than I had realized.

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Commercial shipbuilding keeps moving to whichever country has the cheapest labour, and America has never been that country.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and we see a repeated pattern of it moving to countries with low-cost labor: from Britain to Japan, then to Korea, then to China.

  Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?construction-physics.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Shame is used as a tool of cultural coercion because it reliably makes people shrink and stop taking action.

  Their words

  shame has been sharpened into a tool for cultural coercion and compliance. That what people have figured out is that shame is a is a soft spot on almost everybody. And if you press that spot, people will shrink. They will run away. It is particularly used against women, but it is used against large numbers of people to cause them to not take an action.

  youtube.com

Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  When safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, rolling over public debt without later tax increases is feasible and public debt may carry no fiscal cost.

  public debtinterest rates

  Their words, before

  If the future is like the past, this implies that debt rollovers—that is, the issuance of debt without a subsequent increase in taxes—may well be feasible. Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost.

  Their words now

  Across advanced economies, the celebrated ( r - g ), i.e., the difference between the interest rate and the growth rate, appears to have durably changed sign or, at a minimum, to have gone from a substantially negative number to a number closer to zero.