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Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The rising level of public concern about AI extinction risk is overblown relative to how progress will actually unfold.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  lossy self-improvement remains my baseline on the trajectory of progress, and the increased discussion of extinction risk seems very misplaced

  Why I still haven’t bought into true RSIinterconnects.ai

Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.

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  Recycling metal remains economically worthwhile, but recycling most plastic is not.

  Their words

  It's not a blanket case against recycling: recycled metals are still valuable, but plastics mostly aren't.

  Longreads + Open Threadthediff.co

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

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  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

Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The U.S. dollar's continued global dominance is a lagging indicator, not proof that American hegemony remains intact.

  America

  Their words

  the dollar's status is not a harbinger of U.S. hegemonic decline - it's a lagging indicator.

  The Dollar Will Be the Last Pillar To Falldanieldrezner.substack.com

Wall Street Journal bestselling author on marketing and writing, partner at MarketingProfs, and writer of the fortnightly Total Annarchy newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Writing voice is what remains once a writer stops editing themselves out, not something added on top.

  Their words

  Voice isn't something you add to the writing. It's what's left when you stop editing yourself out of it.

  annhandley.com

Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.

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  Raycast

  Their words

  Raycast, a launcher app that replaces Spotlight, remains my preferred way to navigate a computer.

  platformer.news

Founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group; wrote Inspired, Empowered and Transformed on how product organisations work.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The product role remains essential in the AI era, whatever the tools become.

  Their words

  Ben’s article serves as a great reminder of why the product role is so essential, and is likely to remain essential.

  A Fresh Definition of The Product Rolesvpg.com

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

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  The ChatGPT moment for robotics already happened a couple of years ago; what remains is the unglamorous post-training work.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I would say the chat GPT moment of robots happened a couple of years ago already.

  Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIAyoutube.com

Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.

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  Climate coverage in the media is shrinking and increasingly paywalled.

  Their words

  climate coverage is rapidly shrinking-and what remains is increasingly paywalled

  Churn is upon us!heated.world

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

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  Django Migrations

  Their words

  My favorite implementation of this pattern remains Django’s Migrations

  simonwillison.net

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

  Harness improvements help deploy a model better, but the model's underlying intelligence remains the core driver of capability.

  Their words

  harness improvement enables better deployment of the model but intelligence is still the core.

  Harness Engineering for Self-Improvementlilianweng.github.io

Programmer and writer known for detailed source code reviews of classic game engines, and author of the Game Engine Black Book series on Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

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  ZSA Moonlander

  Their words

  The Moonlander is my dream keyboard. It has everything the Ergodox EZ offers, and it remains ultra-stable while tilted on the Platform. I really hope this will be my last keyboard.

  fabiensanglard.net

Economist at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute; works on what advanced AI would do to growth, saving and the long-run economy.

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  The rules that keep judges, juries and licensed professionals human are transitional, not permanent.

  Their words

  all of these frictions on um the political type decisions that we are accustomed to only trusting human you know, only having humans for like legislation and being a judge, being a jury or all the licensing thing that keeps certain professions human that all strikes me as transitional, right?

  youtube.com

Alignment researcher at Anthropic; co-led OpenAI's superalignment team until 2024, and writes Musings on the Alignment Problem.

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  Alignment of today's models is going well enough to look solvable, while aligning models we can no longer understand remains unsolved.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  This is the hard problem of alignment we need to solve in order to succeed at building superintelligence, and to this day it is an unsolved problem.

  Alignment is not solvedaligned.substack.com

Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.

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  Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond

  Their words

  Though written accessibly, Segerstrale’s narrative rewards repeat reading, because it is so dense with historical detail that remains relevant today.

  razibkhan.com

Investment researcher and engineer who runs Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, writing on macroeconomics, currency systems and equity analysis.

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  Bitcoin's roughly $2 trillion market capitalization is still early relative to its long-term adoption potential.

  Their words

  In my view, Bitcoin at a ~$2 trillion market capitalization remains rather early.

  Why Most Cryptocurrencies Won’t Accrue Valuelynalden.com

Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.

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  Sublime Text

  Their words

  After many years, Sublime Text remains one of my favourite code editors. I still often use it to edit huge files or to make heavy edits through its powerful find and replace feature.

  stefanzweifel.dev

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

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  Moby-Dick

  Their words

  Moby-Dick remains perhaps the best reading experience of my life.

  countercraft.substack.com

Emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London; wrote Strategy: A History and Command, and writes about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as they happen.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  NATO's Article 5 carries no automatic obligation to fight, and it is still the gold standard for a security guarantee.

  Their words

  Despite its lack of automaticity this remains the gold standard for security guarantees.

  samf.substack.com

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Current AI evaluation of world models is too narrow, favoring static representations learned from massive datasets over efficient learning through interaction

  Their words

  However, current understanding and evaluation of world models in artificial intelligence (AI) remains narrow, often focusing on static representations learned from training on massive corpora of data, instead of the efficiency and efficacy in learning these representations through interaction and exploration within a novel environment.

  arxiv.org

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

  Concerns about the energy cost of an individual LLM prompt are no longer credible, though the environmental impact of the AI datacenter buildout remains a real worry.

  LLMsdata centersenergy

  Their words

  Unless you’re an extreme power user, asking AI questions every day is still a rounding error on your total electricity footprint.

  What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?hannahritchie.substack.com

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI writes code well only where a million repositories have already written it; getting it to do something genuinely new remains notoriously hard.

  Their words

  AI is really great at spewing out code that does something that a million GitHub repositories already do because it's learned the underlying pattern. It's notoriously hard to get to do something new that hasn't been done before, especially when it's a complex task.

  youtube.com

Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Without a stock of trained administrators no development strategy of any kind can even begin, whichever theory of growth you hold.

  Their words

  The fact remains that without a stock of capable administrators, industrial policy and export targeting and infrastructure-building—or even Adam Smith’s minimum of “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice”—are a nonstarter.

  global-developments.org

Neuroscientist and novelist writing on consciousness, artificial intelligence and culture in the newsletter The Intrinsic Perspective.

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  The Sistine Chapel

  Their words

  Which remains my favorite “painting” I’ve personally seen in my whole life.

  theintrinsicperspective.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Concerns about the energy cost of an individual LLM prompt are no longer credible, though the environmental impact of the AI datacenter buildout remains a real worry.

  LLMsdata centersenergy

  Their words

  There’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.

  Things we learned about LLMs in 2024simonwillison.net

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

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  Your AI Product Needs Evals

  Their words

  Your AI Product Needs Evals by Hamel Husain remains my favourite piece of writing on how to go about putting these together.

  simonwillison.net

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

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  Kafka on the Shore

  Their words

  Years later, Kafka on the Shore remains one of my favorite all-time audiobooks. It's an extraordinary story, beautifully told.

  seths.blog

Designer, product manager, YouTuber and developer who has written about technology at Birchtree since 2010. He makes the Quick Reviews and Quick Notes apps and the A Better Computer YouTube channel.

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  1Password

  Their words

  As someone who uses more than just Apple devices, 1Password really delivers here and remains my password manager of choice.

  thesweetsetup.com

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

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  The Remains of the Day

  Their words

  The prose is so smooth that like Gene Wolfe’s, it becomes invisible, and you pass through it to the slow silent sorrow of the protagonist.

  gwern.net