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Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI-assisted biological research still depends on physical wet-lab work that remains a necessary bottleneck for now.

  Their words

  This physical work will remain necessary for the foreseeable future.

  What AI can and cannot do in biosecurityyourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Trying to shortcut past necessary personal work always backfires, and real progress requires confronting oneself directly.

  Their words

  anything that feels like a way to get out of doing the work will come back to bite you. You have to go through yourself to get anywhere good.

  some things I’ve learned about relationshipsavabear.xyz

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Commandeering the Intelligence sector would give more limited power over society than it appears, because necessary complements are lacking.

  Their words

  In this model, if someone or something could “commandeer” the Intelligence sector, their power over society would be much more limited than it might appear at first. The world does not change that much at first, because the necessary complements are lacking.

  A simple model of AI-aided economic growthmarginalrevolution.com

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The War on Terror, including the fight against ISIS, was generally successful and necessary.

  Their words

  the War on Terror, including the fight against ISIS, was generally successful and necessary.

  Get the Middle East out of my politics!noahpinion.blog

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  High per-capita energy consumption is necessary for an economy to escape poverty.

  energy

  Their words

  It’s a simple truth that if you want your economy to escape poverty, you need lots of energy consumption

  Why you won’t get a flying carnoahpinion.blog

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Anthropomorphizing AI systems is necessary for reasoning about, explaining, and predicting their behavior accurately.

  Their words

  Anthropomorphizing the AIs is the only way to reason about, explain to civilians about, or make good predictions about current AIs.

  thezvi.substack.com

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

  Writing is itself an act of thinking, so automating the writing removes the thinking, not just the labor.

  Their words

  The act of writing is an act of thinking, and to automate our paragraphs is to populate our screens with words without filling our minds with the ideas necessary to conceive of them.

  We Can't Let AI Writing Take Over the Internetderekthompson.org

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  One-to-one tutoring has always been the best way to teach anybody anything; the only reason schooling was never built that way is that it was not affordable.

  Their words

  Individualized tutoring is the best model. A one-on-one model is the best model. A mentorship model, an apprentice mentor, that is the best model. It's not cost-effective.

  youtube.com

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A century of fire suppression policy in the American West has dangerously overloaded forests with fuel and made megafires more likely.

  America

  Their words

  We now know that fires are necessary for healthy forests, that a century of fire suppression in the West has been disastrous.

  eatingpolicy.com

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The unwritten goals of mathematics must be made explicit, and examining and codifying them will leave the community stronger and more resilient.

  Their words

  I argue that it will become necessary to make these unwritten goals of mathematics much more explicit; but once we have thoroughly examined and codified them, our community will emerge stronger and more resilient than before.

  Mathematics in the age of AIarxiv.org

Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A validated theory of intelligence may be necessary for achieving genuine AI alignment.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  There's a good chance a theory of intelligence will turn out to be necessary for real alignment.

  Without a theory of intelligencekk.org

Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A robot going down a wrong path is not producing training data; the efficient move is for a human to intervene and show the recovery.

  Their words

  and trying to fold two boxes together isn't useful data that will teach the model how to get better at the task. And so that would be kind of wasting a lot of time on the robot attempting to go down the wrong path for solving the problem. And so instead of spending a lot of time trying to do that task, what we'll do is we'll actually have a human intervene and show the robot what to do and how to recover from that situation.

  youtube.com

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Little Schemer

  Their words

  The Little Schemer by Friedman and Felleisen. This book won't teach you Scheme. Rather, it teaches something more valuable: it teaches how to think recursively.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The narrative that AI destroys jobs is exactly backwards: AI automates tasks, and automation is creating jobs everywhere.

  Their words

  The evidence would show that and it makes perfect sense that AI and automation is creating jobs everywhere. The narrative about AI destroying jobs is exactly backwards. AI eliminate tasks. AI automates tasks away. But it doesn't necessary doesn't necessarily eliminate jobs.

  Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIAyoutube.com

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Language classes are worth something for the company and the correction, but listening and reading are what actually teach the language.

  Their words

  Sure, language classes can provide social benefits and feedback. But the real means of learning a language is consistent, ample amounts of listening and reading.

  blog.thelinguist.com

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Writing lines of Python or C++ may stop being necessary; understanding how code, computer systems and products work will not.

  Their words

  I think there's a difference between being able to write lines of code in a particular language like Python or C++ and understanding how code, computer systems, products work. And I don't think the latter is going away.

  youtube.com

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

From one piece Context engineering with Dex Horthy 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You can teach somebody to be a really good AI developer in a few months, but you cannot teach them a computer science degree in three — so hire for the fundamentals.

  Their words

  We can we can teach we can teach somebody, I think, to be a really good AI developer in a few months. You can build enough intuition where you are, you know, accelerated off the ground and you can go like keep growing there. It's really hard to teach someone a CS undergrad program in in 3 months.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The engineering intuition that matters cannot be taught from a textbook — you know bad patterns in software because you have debugged them at three in the morning.

  Their words

  there's a different kind of intuition that you that you develop over years as a software engineer and uh there's many categories of it but the one I'll I'll call attention to that is like a thing that you cannot teach you cannot do you cannot learn in a textbook. The only way to learn it is like I know bad patterns in software because I have debugged them at three in the morning.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Eliminating the friction involved in writing is what matters most for a writer.

  Their words

  I find what is most precious is to eliminate the friction necessary to write.

  Back to writingsriramk.com

Behavioural economist at Chicago Booth, professor of behavioural science and economics and director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Economics cannot say what AI will do to work because the necessary data does not exist; what is needed is a Manhattan Project for data.

  Their words

  we don't have any data. I've been kind of saying we need a Manhattan Project for data. We don't have data on basically consumer demand elasticities. We don't know what they are.

  youtube.com

Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No single piece of business advice is enough on its own to make a business succeed.

  Their words

  Most business advice is necessary but not sufficient on its own to achieve success.

  Necessary but not sufficientjustinjackson.ca

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  If AI permanently drives down demand for labour, long-term income support for a significant fraction of the workforce will likely become necessary.

  Their words

  If AI-driven labor displacement ends up being large in magnitude and permanently drives down the demand for labor, it will likely be necessary to go beyond mere incentive programs to long-term income support for a significant fraction of the labor force.

  Policy on the AI Exponential (June 2026)darioamodei.com

Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Republican lawmakers have lost the party cohesion needed to shield a Trump ally from an impeachment trial.

  Their words

  My guess is Republicans have lost the necessary cohesion to fall on Trump's sword and block a trial.

  Impeach Todd Blanchejoshbarro.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A compiler that also serves an IDE has to be lazy and deferred throughout — a different way of building compilers from the one the textbooks teach.

  Their words

  And so everything is lazy and deferred and functional and reusable inside the compiler. And it's a very different way of writing compilers than than what the textbooks will traditionally teach you.

  youtube.com

Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  How big a government you want determines necessary tax rates, but any such system depends on people actually paying their taxes.

  government

  Their words

  The necessary tax rates depend on how big a government you want, but all these systems rely on people paying taxes.

  Stop Microlooting the Tax Codejoshbarro.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI-written code makes formal proof necessary, because human review of all that generated code becomes the bottleneck.

  LLMs

  Their words

  But also LLMs increase the need for these formal proofs because, you know, we're live coding a bunch of stuff. If we have to manually review all of that code, then that will become the bottleneck.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nvidia's business is the transformation of electrons into tokens, and its job is to do as much as necessary and as little as possible in between.

  Their words

  my mental model of our company the input is electron the output is tokens that is in the middle Nvidia and our job is to to do as much as necessary as little as possible to enable that transformation to be done at incredible capabilities

  Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The right way to specify a rescue rewrite is a couple of scaling constraints and no new features at all, so that hardware can absorb the growth the team has no time to design for.

  Their words

  No new feature necessary. Just make sure that we can do that. And then that allow the business the company to just pour a whole bunch of hardware behind that and it will scale.

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

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Open-source models are fundamentally necessary for most industries, countries and researchers to join the AI revolution at all.

  open source

  Their words

  And if everything is proprietary, it's hard to do research and it's hard to innovate on top of, around, with. And so… Open source is fundamentally necessary for many industries to join the AI revolution.

  youtube.com

Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Bigger is smarter, always: bringing your special domain knowledge to the model is the wrong side of the bitter lesson.

  Their words

  The bitter lesson is don't try to be smarter than the AI, okay? You think that you've got special knowledge. The humans bring special domain knowledge to this problem and we're going to teach it something to AI and it will be smarter. What we found was bigger is smarter. Always.

  From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  RL environments exist to make a model generalise, not to teach it each skill one at a time — exactly as pre-training does.

  Their words

  the goal is not to teach the model every possible skill within RL just as we don't do that within pre-training, right? Within pre-training, we're not trying to expose the model to, you know, every every possible you know, way that words could be put together, right? You know, we're it's it's rather that the model trains on a lot of things and then and then it reaches generalization across pre-training, right?

  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.

Entrepreneur and founder of Blueprint. Publishes a detailed, freely available longevity protocol documenting the food, supplements, devices and measurements he uses on himself.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Eight Sleep

  Their words

  Consider using a noise machine to offset environmental sounds or earplugs if necessary. Temperature controlled mattresses such as Eight Sleep are great.

  protocol.bryanjohnson.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well

  Their words

  Product managers must learn to give and receive feedback with candor and kindness, and without withholding. This book, also from the Harvard Negotiation Project, will teach you how.

  bringthedonuts.com

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Creativity, Inc

  Their words

  , you’ll enjoy Catmull’s book about putting 10x into practice. He draws from the success – and failures – of Pixar to teach us how to lead creative teams.

  bringthedonuts.com

American author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Undoing Project, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.

From one piece 10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good reporting is being the world's best student: gather everything before making judgments, and make people want to teach you.

  Their words

  You are gathering before you make judgments. You're open to learning things. You're trying to be the world's best student. You want people to want to teach you.

  10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The job of a writer is to get the reader into a state of mind where they will follow you anywhere, including into subjects they never knew they wanted.

  Their words

  you grab the listener like I try to grab a reader and get them to the state of mind where they'll let you take them anywhere uh and teach them about stuff that they don't even know they want to learn about.

  10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)youtube.com

Medieval historian at the LSE; writes Going Medieval and The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, and spends a lot of it correcting what people think the period was like.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Roman Empire was not necessary to keep industry going: metal production in Britain rose after the Romans withdrew.

  Their words

  The Roman Empire, therefore, is actually not necessary for keeping industry going.

  On contrarian historygoing-medieval.com

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A skill being automated is not a reason to stop learning it: practising what machines already do is often the stepping stone to what only people can do.

  Their words

  Very often, learning skills that are automated in practice is a necessary stepping stone to cultivating uniquely human skills.

  Will AI Make Us Stupid?scotthyoung.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A Chinese crewed landing on the Moon before America returns would be a defeat for the free world.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  I am far from certain that NASA can regain anything like the vigor necessary to respond decisively to the Chinese threat, but I am determined that the free people of Earth not live under a Red Moon

  NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A phone is not a necessary device; set your own agenda and the phone only gets in the way.

  Their words

  I don't think a phone is a necessary device. I remember growing up, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I was a student at the university, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I finally got to use a mobile phone, I never used phone calls.

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The most underused thing AI does is teach you: people reach for it to write their code and forget it can take them through a curriculum in an hour.

  Their words

  So yes, the tools are great. We can use cursor. It helps us. It autocompletes. It writes a bunch of things. But the acceleration of learning I think is another maybe underutilized tool in all of our arsenals

  youtube.com

Professor at Berkeley working on robot learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence, and argues that robots will learn from data rather than be programmed.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Once a robot is good enough, you can teach it with words instead of with demonstrations, and language becomes a training signal for motor skill.

  Their words

  Like now, like basically learning is not for these systems is not just learning from raw actions. It's also learning from words eventually be learning from observing what people do from the kind of natural feedback that you receive when you're doing a job together with somebody else.

  youtube.com

Product designer and entrepreneur; author of Mobile First and Web Form Design; formerly a product director at Google; now building AI products.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Web forms make people adapt to databases; AI flips this so people can provide information in any form they like, and no form is the best kind of web form design.

  Their words

  With Web forms, the burden is on people to adapt to databases. Today's AI models, however, can flip this requirement. That is, they allow people to provide information in whatever form they like and use AI do the work necessary to put that information into the right structure for a database.

  lukew.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An international AI safety body modeled on the IAEA would not by itself be enough to prevent AI-related geopolitical crises.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  the current situation in Iran shows that even if an "IAEA for AI" is necessary for some purposes, it won't be sufficient for resolving the tricky geopolitical issues raised by AI.

  milesbrundage.substack.com

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  How to Feed the World

  Their words

  How to Feed the World had a lot to teach me—and I’m sure it will teach you a lot, too.

  gatesnotes.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good storytelling doesn't require inventing something entirely new; it can be built from existing material.

  Their words

  One myth of good storytelling is that it requires dreaming up something entirely new from scratch. That's not necessary.

  Storytelling for Product Leadersbringthedonuts.com

Machine learning engineer working on recommender systems, personalization and information retrieval. Previously worked on LLMs and LLM infrastructure at Mozilla.ai and on ML and recsys at Duo, Tumblr, Automattic and Comcast; wrote the 'What are embeddings?' text and ran the Normconf conference.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reading fiction is necessary to an engineer's creative capacity; reading only technical books drains it

  energy

  Their words

  Yet, I also need to read fiction because if I only read tech books, they take away my creative energy rather than grant it, as fiction does.

  Favorite books of 2024vickiboykis.com

Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Scaling the 2019-2023 recipe — same architecture, bigger model, more data — is not enough; further progress depends on new architectural ideas.

  Their words

  Neurosymbolic AI — combining such machinery with neural networks – is likely a necessary condition for going forward.

  garymarcus.substack.com

Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Using supervised fine-tuning to teach a language model new knowledge risks increasing its hallucination rate.

  LLMs

  Their words

  These empirical results from Gekhman et al. (2024) point out the risk of using supervised fine-tuning for updating LLMs' knowledge.

  Extrinsic Hallucinations in LLMslilianweng.github.io

Language mentor and polyglot; teaches people to design their own learning method rather than follow a course.

From one piece About Me 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The thing worth teaching is not a language but how to learn languages, because that skill repeats for every language after it.

  Their words

  I don't teach people languages, I teach them how they can learn languages by themselves.

  About Melanguagementoring.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nobody can be taught a language by anyone else; a teacher can help, but the learning is the learner's to do.

  Their words

  I'm convinced that it's not possible to teach anyone a language. A good teacher can help you on this journey – but they cannot give the language to you on a silver platter.

  About Melanguagementoring.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Copenhagen interpretation taught to physics students is a God-awful mess; many-worlds is beautiful because it needs fewer ingredients and one equation.

  Their words

  If you think about how we teach quantum mechanics to our students, the Copenhagen interpretation, it’s a God-awful mess. No one’s going to accuse that of being very beautiful. I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world.

  youtube.com

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

From one piece Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #419 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The openness that matters is putting increasingly powerful tools into people's hands for free as a public good, not open-sourcing the weights.

  Their words

  We want to put increasingly powerful tools in the hands of people for free and get them to use them. I think that kind of open is really important to our mission. I think if you give people great tools and teach them to use them or don’t even teach them, they’ll figure it out, and let them go build an incredible future for each other with that, that’s a big deal.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Advertising was a necessary phase for the internet but a momentary industry, and an AI people pay for is better because they know the answers are not influenced by advertisers.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I kind of hate ads just as an aesthetic choice. I think ads needed to happen on the internet for a bunch of reasons, to get it going, but it’s a momentary industry. The world is richer now. I like that people pay for ChatGPT and know that the answers they’re getting are not influenced by advertisers.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.

From one piece Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech | Lex Fridman Podcast #413 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An independently owned platform is a necessary counterweight to the government and the mainstream media.

  government

  Their words

  So having an independently owned powerful platform is very important for truth, for free speech, for hearing the other side of the story, for counterbalancing the power of the government.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A large, respected owner on the board is what buys a CEO the time to make decisions that only pay off years later.

  Their words

  That large owner on the board can help buy the time necessary for management to behave in a longer term way. And that's, I think, good for all the shareholders.

  youtube.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

• Our readingkorrents.com

  As models get better at following instructions, techniques like finetuning and constrained sampling for structured outputs will become less necessary

  Their words

  I suspect that in the future, it'll be easier to get models to output exactly what we need with minimal prompting, and these techniques will become less important.

  huyenchip.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.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  The Greek Way

  Their words

  Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way is a wonderful discussion of what made the Greeks so special, what they can teach us and how they thought about life.

  ryanholiday.net

Research scientist at Meta in Berlin working on multilingual models and evaluation; led the multilingual team at Cohere and was a research scientist at Google DeepMind before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Full fine-tuning of large language models has become too costly, making parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods necessary.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Full fine-tuning of LLMs has become prohibitive and requires parameter-efficient methods instead.

  EMNLP 2023 Primerruder.io

Writer and artist, author of Steal Like an Artist; publishes a weekly newsletter and an annual list of the books he read.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The mediocre is the only thing worth avoiding: the best and the worst both teach you something, the middle teaches nothing.

  Their words

  What you want to avoid, I think, is mediocre writing, which neither thrills nor instructs.

  Read terrible books, tooaustinkleon.com

Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The central problem of the food system is producing much more food on much less land.

  Their words

  it’s going to be incredibly difficult, but also incredibly necessary, for the world to produce much more food with much less land.

  The Food Problem Is Bigger Than Lettucemichaelgrunwald.substack.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Grading flattens whatever is taught into what can be tested, and teaches students to ignore everything else.

  Their words

  Evaluation forces me to flatten everything I teach into something that can be tested, and it encourages students to ignore everything that isn’t on the test.

  I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com

Founder of Pinboard; writes Idle Words — talks and essays on the web, aviation, politics and travel.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The International Space Station exists mainly to teach its builders how to build another space station.

  Their words

  The ISS crew spend most of their time fixing the machinery that keeps them alive, and when they have a free moment for science, they tend to study the effect of space on themselves.

  Why Not Marsidlewords.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is no necessary trajectory from simple life to complexity: without photosynthesis or eukaryotes, the planet could have stayed bacteria and nothing else.

  Their words

  So, there is no necessary trajectory towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it. It’s very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis arising or without eukaryotes arising, that the planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.

  youtube.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The binding constraint on pre-modern campaigning was feeding the army every day it was in the field, not winning the battle at the end of it.

  Their words

  In order to move this army or sustain it in place it is thus necessary to ensure a massive and relatively continuous supply of food to the army. Failure to do that will result in the army falling apart long before it comes anywhere close to the enemy.

  acoup.blog

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Both instruction and practice are necessary for learning, and which of them comes first matters less than having both.

  Their words

  For starters, it’s abundantly clear that both practice and instruction are necessary for effective learning.

  scotthyoung.com

Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Adding a dependency is a serious commitment requiring an audit and continued re-auditing, and the usual practice of not doing so is reckless.

  Their words

  Adding a dependency is a serious decision which requires consensus within the team, an audit of the new dependency, an understanding of its health and long-term prospects, and an ongoing commitment to re-audit them and be prepared to change course as necessary.

  I will pay you cash to delete your npm moduledrewdevault.com

Biologist at the MIT Media Lab; invented CRISPR gene drives and then spent years arguing for safeguards against their misuse and against engineered pandemics.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Research programmes that identify or create pandemic-capable viruses teach the world how to make them, and should stop.

  Their words

  But perhaps the biggest question of all isn’t being asked insistently enough: Why is anyone trying to teach the world how to make viruses that could kill millions of people?

  media.mit.edu

Obesity researcher; wrote The Hungry Brain, on why the brain overeats, and reviews nutrition evidence.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Energy imbalance is a necessary link in the causal chain of obesity: there is no other way for the extra energy to arrive in the body.

  energy

  Their words

  No matter what your model of obesity is, in order to explain the development of an obese body, energy imbalance has to be a link in the model’s causal chain.

  stephanguyenet.com

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nobody can drive the billions of representative miles that would prove a self-driving system safe before deploying it, so deployment always precedes proof.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  But nobody will ever get to the billions of representative miles necessary to say anything compelling about expected safety until after they actually deploy their fleet.

  safeautonomy.blogspot.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.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Own the Room: Business Presentations that Persuade, Engage, and Get Results

  Their words

  If you want one book to teach you everything you need to know about giving great presentations, this is the book. A film director, a psychologist, and an actor share their combined experiences to help improve your content, the design, your movements, and just about every other detail of being a great speaker. It was a slow start, but by the end, I had dog-eared dozens of pages and marked up many more which I was able to directly apply to a major talk I was working on.

  jasonevanish.com

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  You can't teach a kid to ride a bicycle at a seminar

  Their words

  Sales isn't easy to learn, especially when you have beginners luck and then hit a wall. This book, from the Sandler Sales Method, gives a good overview of the approach, and why it can be easier to sell when you first start, than once you get into it.

  jasonevanish.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

• Recommendssponsoredrcmnd.app

  Khan Academy

  Their words

  They are probably most famous for the videos Sal does, but arguably the site is most valuable as a source of problems you can drill on, starting from the very basics if necessary. I may be biased, though, given that I used to work there!

  3blue1brown.com

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  The Cauchy-Schwarz Master Class

  Their words

  The strength of this book is the central role it places on problems. Its aim is to teach you about inequalities, which are the backbone of analysis. But it's all too easy to teach the statement of an inequality without conveying the intuition for when and how you'd use it. By focusing on well-chosen puzzles, this book does an admirable job circumventing that risk and leaving you with the feeling of having trained a skill, rather than having learned a list of facts.

  3blue1brown.com

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  Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

  Their words

  I feel like Ben Orlin solved what was previously an unsolved problem with this book: Teach calculus in a way that is as enjoyable to those unfamiliar with the topic as it is to experts who use it every day. I, for one, was laughing from page 1.

  3blue1brown.com

Co-founder, chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Hosts the Masters in Business podcast for Bloomberg and wrote How NOT to Invest.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us about Economics and Life

  Their words

  Alan B. Krueger, Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us about Economics and Life: From the economist who revealed the secrets of the minimum wage comes this look at the economics of the music industry. Its disruptions by technology to economics of songwriting and concert tours, the music industry offers important financial lessons. Kreuger, an economic rock star himself (he was former chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers) left us far too soon.

  ritholtz.com

Security researcher; founded Have I Been Pwned, and writes and speaks about data breaches.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every website needs HTTPS, including a static site with no login and nothing sensitive on it.

  Their words

  So that's precisely what I've done - intercepted my own traffic passed over an insecure connection and put together a string of demos in a 24-minute video explaining why HTTPS is necessary on a static website.

  Here's Why Your Static Website Needs HTTPStroyhunt.com

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A large fraction of what the people around you believe is mistaken, and nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself.

  Their words

  More broadly, nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview.

  Advicepatrickcollison.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.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  OpenBSD

  Their words

  But if you’re experienced, like to “look under the hood”, and prefer software that does the minimum necessary, OpenBSD is for you.

  sive.rs

Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Influence

  Their words

  Influence was fundamental and had a lot to teach.

  x.com

Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.

• Mixed onaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Cracking the Coding Interview

  Their words

  I usually recommend this book to people who want to pass interviews but not really learn about algorithms. It has just enough to get by, but doesn't really teach you the why behind anything.

  danluu.com

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  The Algorithm Design Manual

  Their words

  The longer, more comprehensive, more practical, less math-y version of Dasgupta. It's similar in that it attempts to teach you how to identify problems, use the correct algorithm, and give a clear explanation of the algorithm.

  danluu.com

Programmer and teacher; wrote Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby and 99 Bottles of OOP.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Existing code exerts a powerful influence: its presence argues that it is correct and necessary, and sunk cost keeps teams inside an abstraction that has stopped fitting.

  Their words

  Existing code exerts a powerful influence. Its very presence argues that it is both correct and necessary.

  The Wrong Abstractionsandimetz.com

Game designer; wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Designing a game imprints behaviour on the people who play it, including behaviour the designer never intended to teach.

  Their words

  know in your bones that game design is a powerful way of imprinting behaviors on people, and that it is entirely possible to imprint behaviors you didn’t want.

  Games affecting peopleraphkoster.com

Game designer; wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good interface design uses clarity to hide complexity; good game design uses clarity to teach it.

  Their words

  UX is about clarity that hides complexity, and game design is about clarity that teaches complexity.

  Game design vs UX designraphkoster.com

Game designer; wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A slot machine triggers the brain’s learning and curiosity pathways while teaching nothing, and that one-way exchange is what makes it contemptuous of the player.

  Their words

  Slot machines don’t teach you anything; they trigger the learning and curiosity pathways without actually giving you a benefit in return.

  Social games vs gamblingraphkoster.com

Cognitive scientist and designer; author of The Design of Everyday Things; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group; former vice president at Apple; founding director of the Design Lab at UC San Diego.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Design thinking is practised by all great thinkers, but design is the one field that tries to teach it as a systematic method rather than leave it to the exceptional.

  Their words

  I was correct in my original article: what we call design thinking is practiced in some form or other by all great thinkers, whether in literature or art, music or science, engineering or business. But the difference is that in design, there is an attempt to teach it as a systematic, practice-defining method of creative innovation.

  Rethinking Design Thinkingcore77.com

Polyglot; founded Fluent in 3 Months and argues for speaking from day one rather than waiting until you are ready.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Speaking badly is not a failure on the way to speaking well; it is a stage that has to be passed through on purpose.

  Their words

  I learned a long time ago that speaking like “Tarzan” is an absolutely necessary stage to go through, so you get used to using the language in SOME way. You learn to get used to the embarrassment and get on with learning quicker.

  fluentin3months.com

Librarian, technology instructor and writer in rural Vermont; longtime community manager at MetaFilter and author of a book on the digital divide.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Firefox

  Their words

  Firefox is my main browser but I sometimes teach classes in how to use Safari.

  usesthis.com

Interactive narrative designer and critic; author of interactive fiction including Galatea and Counterfeit Monkey, and a long-time contributor to the Inform development system.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  BBEdit

  Their words

  I frequently brainstorm on paper or in BBEdit. I also use BBEdit for composing reviews and articles, as much as I can get away with, and turn to Microsoft Word only when it's professionally necessary.

  usesthis.com

Sociologist at Duke University writing on markets, exchange and moral order, and on plain-text and data-visualisation tools for social science.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Anti-Social

  Their words

  Fred Stutzman's two little apps, Freedom and Anti-Social, are increasingly necessary for my well-being.

  usesthis.com

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Freedom

  Their words

  Fred Stutzman's two little apps, Freedom and Anti-Social, are increasingly necessary for my well-being.

  usesthis.com

Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

  Their words

  and there aren't many books like it. None, maybe. They don't typically teach you how to write good code in school, and you may never learn on the job.

  sites.google.com

Co-founder and CEO of Linear; previously principal designer at Airbnb, where he led the Design Language System, and founding designer at Coinbase.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  In making products, taste is not a matter of opinion but a sense of sophistication, learned by making something real rather than at school.

  Their words

  In making products, taste is not a matter of opinion, but an actual sense of sophistication that a person has. People who make new things need to practice taste and recognize beauty when they see it. Schools or education have very little to teach in the area of taste, you need to get involved in making something real.

  Your Product Needs a Soulkarrisaarinen.com