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Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Mathematicians using AI agents to produce proofs should have to disclose in detail how the agents were used, the way experimental scientists must describe their methods.

  Their words

  the math community needs to adopt a version of the ethical standards of experimental science. If you are using AI agents, you can't just give a proof (formalized or not), but need to also provide a detailed explanation of how these agents were used to get the result.

  A Modest Proposalmath.columbia.edu

Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The methods and techniques a writer uses to compose a work shape the finished work as much as a painter's or musician's technical choices shape theirs.

  Their words

  The methods we choose to use to compose the work determine the final work as much as any decision by a painter or musician.

  countercraft.substack.com

Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Educational methods should be validated by measurable research, not by how satisfying they feel to students and teachers.

  Their words

  The deeper lesson is that education has to be research-based and proven to work measurably, not just based on positive emotions or customer satisfaction.

  fortelabs.com

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Monitors that read an agent's chain of thought must be kept out of the reward signal, or you are simply training the agent to obfuscate its thinking.

  Their words

  But keep those methods you use to investigate things and monitor things very separate from the methods you use to generate reward which is something that AI companies including open AAI have held up as a principle especially in the case of avoiding putting training pressure on the chain of thought. So you might have monitors that read the agents chain of thought in order to alert you if something is going wrong somewhere but you don't train the agents with the outputs of that monitor.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A formal code of conduct is not worth adopting, because those became struggle-session processes; courtesy without one is what actually wins.

  Omarchy

  Their words

  Omarchy is not going to adopt a formal Code of Conduct because those turned out to be struggle-session processes in the last turning. But we are going to play nice. We're going to be courteous, professional, and composed in our direct interactions with users, competitors, and even haters. Because that's what's going to pave the path to the win.

  @dhh on Xx.com

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

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  When a bureaucracy never issues a formal refusal, there is no decision to argue against, only endless shadowboxing.

  Their words

  If the city said no we could have an argument about procedures and decisions, but as it stands its all shadowboxing.

  acesounderglass.com

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

From one piece Formal methods with Hillel Wayne 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  AI is making formal methods more popular without making them mainstream, moving them from about a tenth of a per cent of engineers to three tenths.

  Their words

  I think it is making it more popular. I don't know if it'll make it go mainstream, but it's definitely making it a lot more popular. It's bringing it from maybe like 0.1% to 0.3% which is huge.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

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  Formal methods are a niche tool; property-based testing is the one most engineers should adopt, and stopping there is a fine place to stop.

  Their words

  I love formal methods, but I think it's a fairly niche tool for most people and I think like property-based testing is in general going to be useful for more people.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

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  Formal methods shine in highly computational domains and struggle wherever the problem is embedded in human business behaviour.

  Their words

  I think the case of TLA+ and most, not all, but most formal methods, they shine the most in highly computational domains, where most of the problems are highly technical and not like business embedded.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

+ 2 more

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  Formal methods are not used everywhere because for most real problems writing down what the function should do is itself a nightmare, and a program that is right ninety-nine per cent of the time is good enough.

  Their words

  when you start talking about like most interesting domain problems, you have to pull in so much context that basically even writing what the function is supposed to do becomes a nightmare. The imperative program you write that will get correct 99% of the time is probably good enough to use in almost all cases.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Engineers are sceptical of formal methods because they were burned by CASE and UML, sold as miracle solutions and imposed on them regardless of fit.

  Their words

  I think a lot of the reason people are skeptical of these is because they've been burned by things like case and UML and all these other miracle solutions that were forced on them by people who wanted them to use it no matter what.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

From one piece From Solvers to Research: Large Language Model-Driven Formal Mathematics at the Research Frontier (with 18 co-authors) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  AI systems are now capable of meaningful contributions to formal mathematics, not only informal problem-solving.

  Their words

  These developments inform our position that AI systems are now capable of meaningful contributions to formal mathematics, not merely informal problem-solving.

  arxiv.org

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  The next advance in AI for mathematics requires shifting from predefined problem-solvers to research agents that address frontier challenges with formal reasoning.

  Their words

  We argue that the next leap in AI4Math systems requires a decisive shift from predefined problem-solvers to research agents that can address frontier mathematical challenges with rigorous formal mathematical reasoning.

  arxiv.org

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Mathematics alone can be left running: point a prover at a formal library, walk away for ten years, and there will be something there when you come back.

  Their words

  That's a very unique thing that math has that nothing else has where you could press go and then just like just just poor compute at it and like look away for 10 years and then come back and say like what do you have and there's there's going to be something, right?

  youtube.com

Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Efficiency is the wrong measure of a food system; what matters is what it costs at a level of energy and materials that can be sustained.

  energy

  Their words

  a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput.

  chrissmaje.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

  Performance can still double, but cost and area will no longer come down with it unless new materials or new design methods arrive.

  Their words

  and then the power and the cost and then you can double the performance but you cannot double down on the cost and and area. So those are the thing you have to give give way unless you find some new way of material new way of design.

  youtube.com

Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A well-designed AI-integrated approach to schoolwork can produce better learning outcomes than pre-AI research and writing methods.

  Their words

  I truly believe that following this kind of approach to AI in the classroom would, in the aggregate, produce better learning outcomes than the research and writing workflows available to students pre-AI.

  Cognitive Uploadingadjacentpossible.substack.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.

From one piece Why I'm Skeptical About Efforts to Revolutionize Schooling 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Whenever two teaching methods are rigorously compared, strong direct instruction plus practice wins.

  Their words

  In short, whenever we have high-quality evidence that rigorously compares two teaching methods, the research invariably favors strong, direct instruction plus practice

  scotthyoung.com

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  General problem-solving ability is neither learned nor taught; what transfers has to be taught explicitly rather than discovered through projects.

  Their words

  General problem solving abilities are neither learned nor taught. While some problem-solving methods have broader applicability than others (such as the scientific process of hypothesis testing), students learn these methods better when they’re explicitly taught rather than simply giving students projects and hoping they’ll reinvent them on their own.

  scotthyoung.com

Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

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  Practicing meditation for methods rather than for results is one of the most important principles in contemplative practice.

  Their words

  I think it's one of the most important warnings in contemplative practice, a warning sticker that should go on every single meditation book.

  sashachapin.substack.com

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

From one piece Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  A test checks a handful of examples; a proof settles an infinite state space, which is why formal methods can say things testing never can.

  Their words

  But a proof can reason about potentially infinite state spaces. So, it can tell you things about like every possible thing that could possibly happen in the entire universe.

  youtube.com

• 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

• 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

  Engineer from the physical limits first, then improve, rather than shaving a few days off a 74-day process by continuous improvement.

  Their words

  I don't love the other methods, which is continuous improvement. The problem with continuous improvement, it… First of all, you should engineer something from first principles at the speed, you know, with speed of light thinking. Limit it only by physical limits, and physics limits. And after that, of course you would improve it over time.

  youtube.com

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  AI will revolutionise mathematics by giving it an experimental side: large-scale data on which methods work, rather than the careful solving of individual problems.

  Their words

  So, I think AI-type tools we really will will actually revolutionize the ex- the experimental side of math where where um you don't care so much about uh individual problems and and the process of solving them, but you you want to gather just large-scale data about about what things work, what things don't.

  youtube.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  America cannot simply copy China's manufacturing methods, because which technology is correct depends on the local price of labour.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  Second, technologies and market structure are contextual, where the US can't simply emulate China's manufacturing.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Traditional performance engineering methods are insufficient for the scale of modern AI datacenters and need new approaches.

  data centers

  Their words

  I've realized that performance engineering as we know it may not be enough - I'm thinking of new engineering methods so that we can find bigger optimizations than we have before, and find them faster.

  Why I joined OpenAIbrendangregg.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.

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  Team of Rivals

  Their words

  Abraham Lincoln surrounded himself with his opponents, gradually turning them into admirers and influential advisors. Lincoln’s approach to leadership offers lessons for anyone looking to tap into the wisdom of others, with or without formal authority.

  bringthedonuts.com

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Economics journals have made large datasets and heavy statistics the price of making any causal claim at all, which has squeezed qualitative economic history out of the field.

  Their words

  Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.

  Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobelageofinvention.xyz

Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Langsmith

  Their words

  The overall workflow is intuitive, especially for those new to formal evaluation processes. The UI guides you through creating datasets, running experiments, and annotating results.

  hamel.dev

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Who is in a school predicts its results better than anything about its teaching, its teachers or its methods.

  Their words

  Once again, the composition of the student body is always more powerful a predictor than any identifiable pedagogical, school, or teacher variable.

  There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We have almost no automated techniques for making a system transfer what it learns, and none of the few we have are used in modern deep learning.

  Their words

  We don't have any methods that are good at that. What we have are people um try different things and they they settle on something that that uh a representation that that transfers well or they generalize as well. But we have no we don't have any automated techniques to promote. we have very few automated techniques to promote transfer and they're not none of them are used in in modern deep learning.

  youtube.com

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

  The published estimates of data-centre water consumption rest on accounting choices that push the number as high as it will go.

  data centers

  Their words

  However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption.

  I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumptionconstruction-physics.com

Runs global health R&D at Open Philanthropy; writes about the science and medicine that could exist and does not.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fifty years on, monoclonal antibodies still cannot be manufactured cheaply enough to use them for obvious jobs like preventing malaria in children.

  Their words

  Yet the production methods still can’t make them below $10 per gram, so they’re still not cheap enough for some “obvious” applications like preventing kids getting malaria in a rainy season.

  AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com

Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  LLM-based evaluation methods are more reliable and nuanced than traditional automated metrics

  LLMs

  Their words

  This is why model-based evaluation is increasingly popular-it offers more reliable and nuanced evals than traditional metrics.

  eugeneyan.com

Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI in chess and mathematics does not explain anything; it says which position is better, and humans build the theory from that.

  Their words

  I don’t believe it’s providing a kind of formal explanation of the different positions. It’s just saying which position is better or not that you can intuit as a human being, and then from that, we humans can construct a theory of the matter.

  youtube.com

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The success of large language models vindicates semantic inferentialism over symbolic, rule-based approaches to AI.

  LLMs

  Their words

  The success of LLMs can thus be seen as vindicating semantic inferentialism against earlier, symbolic approaches to AI that tried and failed to explicate the rules of ordinary language using formal logic.

  Do LLMs really reason?secondbest.ca

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Science has come to treat its formal systems as more real than the experience they were abstracted from: 60 degrees as more real than hot and cold.

  Their words

  And then we end up at the bottom of that with this idea of everyday I wake up and I check my phone and I'm like, oh, it's going to be 60 degrees out. Great. And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold. That thermodynamics, the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from.

  youtube.com

Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Godel, Escher, Bach

  Their words

  The formal systems, they are everywhere.

  worrydream.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Large language models do not reason formally: their performance collapses as a problem is made bigger, in the way a calculator's never does.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Another manifestation of the lack of sufficiently abstract, formal reasoning in LLMs is the way in which performance often fall apart as problems are made bigger.

  garymarcus.substack.com

Founder of the International Center for Clinical Excellence and originator of Feedback-Informed Treatment. Writes about what actually makes a therapist effective, usually against the field's own assumptions about training and experience.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Training a therapist in a treatment model does not make them more effective, however well the model performs in a trial.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  Over the last 50 years, treatment methods have proliferated despite a lack of evidence of differential effectiveness between approaches. And even when a randomized controlled trial indicates a particular approach works, none show practitioners become more effective when they are trained in that modality.

  writings.scottdmiller.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.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Neural Network Methods for Natural Language Processing

  Their words

  I also read a ton of technical books last year, but the most impactful one for me was Neural Network Methods for Natural Language processing by Yoav Goldberg

  vickiboykis.com

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

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Evernote

  Their words

  If you look at the sheer number of different methods for getting content into Evernote, it becomes clear how difficult it will be to replicate this functionality.

  fortelabs.com

Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Language models have codified formal written language at a moment in time, which leaves informal, inventive, in-group speech as the place where humanness still shows.

  Their words

  We have designed a system that automates a standardised way of writing. We have codified la langue at a specific point in time.

  The Dark Forest and Generative AImaggieappleton.com

Programmer known online as technomancy; author of Leiningen, the Clojure build tool, and a maintainer of the Fennel programming language.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No single way of modeling data and methods in code is universally correct; every approach is just a set of trade-offs.

  Their words

  But I do want to stress that each of these five approaches are all just trade-offs, and none of them are universally wrong.

  in which five different paths lead to methodstechnomancy.us

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for the protein-structure work behind AlphaFold.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Existing protein structure prediction methods fall far short of atomic accuracy when no homologous structure is available.

  Their words

  Despite recent progress10-14, existing methods fall far short of atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available.

  doi.org

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.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Alchemy

  Their words

  Rory Sutherland was part of one of the most legendary ad agencies in the world (Ogilvy) and shared the truth of what he has seen work best in advertising. The truth is that most of it is totally unexpected and counterintuitive. It was always the craziest, boldest, most unique things that outperformed the "tried and true" methods. This book will help your marketing get out of the incremental rut and on track with bolder ideas.

  jasonevanish.com

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  Tested Advertising Methods

  Their words

  If you want to learn the art and science of copywriting, then this is the book for you. An expert copywriter for decades, Caples breaks down in detail what makes a great ad versus a failing one. It's loaded with examples and the kind of insights only a veteran can provide. You do need to provide a little imagination as he focuses on mail in based advertising in magazines, which isn't common today. But really, how different is that from downloading free whitepapers today?

  jasonevanish.com

Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

  Their words

  Such an incredible book on becoming a better chef, with little tricks and methods I use almost every day now. Plus the recipes in the back are delicious!

  nateliason.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

  Experts should supply the facts and leave the methods to the people affected: a community will trust and implement a solution it chose itself, even one identical to the expert's.

  Their words

  If the people can decide, even if they come up with the same, identical solution as the expert people or machines, they will trust them, implement them, and abide with them.

  jnd.org

Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Methods of Ethics

  Their words

  Parfit himself said that The Methods of Ethics contains more true statements about ethics than any other work: it builds on the work of other great scholars, but it contains more truth than other works. I do think it is a wonderful work, and if it is not the best book written on ethics, I'd like to know what is.

  fivebooks.com