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Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.

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  Feeling highly generative during a phase of creative experimentation tends to coincide with producing nothing of finished, production-grade quality.

  Their words

  When you're in a phase of experimentation, it's not particularly surprising that you will feel very generative and, at the same time, that nothing will be of production-grade quality, so to speak.

  henrikkarlsson.xyz

British comics writer and novelist (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, The Authority, Gun Machine). Keeps a public daily notebook logging what he reads, watches and listens to.

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  Sisu 2: Road to Revenge

  Their words

  LAST WATCHED: SISU 2: ROAD TO REVENGE (2025) is, sadly, a more conventional film than the original. Still lots of bloody fun, but too similar to the original in its beats to be as enjoyable, trying harder to be “emotional” while losing some of the little textual depth that made the first film surprising.

  warrenellis.ltd

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

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  The Elements of Style

  Their words

  I wish everybody read this book. The surprising thing is that many aspects and recommendations apply to virtually any language, not specifically English.

  rakhim.org

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

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  Low-quality data makes a robot model worse unless you tell the model the data is low quality; labelled as such, the same data makes it better.

  Their words

  without metadata prompting when you add lower quality data from 80% data to 100% data the performance actually decreases which is perhaps not too surprising because you're adding lowquality data to your data mixture whereas with the metadata prompting the performance actually increases when you add that lowquality data

  youtube.com

Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.

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  An open weights model from 2025 with a pentest harness could already escape a sandbox and hack most networks; the surprise says more about the sandbox than the model.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes.

  @tqbf on Xx.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.

From one piece Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) – AI disproved a famous math conjecture. Now what? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  It would be disappointing and surprising if the next five years of AI progress in mathematics produced no economically valuable improvements traceable to it.

  Their words

  but it would be a little bit disappointing and a little bit surprising if there weren't over the next 5 years like, uh, economically valuable improvements that were made that were directly like referable to the like AI progress in math.

  youtube.com

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  If AI can build the new theory that crystallises how to think about a subject, it would be surprising if that capability did not spill into the rest of the economy.

  Their words

  that like if it's capable of building mountains uh that are, you know, the correct new theory that like crystallizes how we should be thinking about a subject, that's just such a level of intelligence that then it starts to feel like it would be surprising if that didn't permeate into other aspects of the economy besides like just the mountain building for math itself.

  youtube.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.

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  Rishi Dandelion Ginger

  Their words

  Rishi Dandelion Ginger. Extraordinary and surprising. And most things taste better mixed with tonic.

  seths.blog

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  Truly perfect friends do not exist.

  Their words

  Perfect friends are not possible. Instead of wondering how to change them, perhaps try being just a tiny bit more patient, and see how they might end up surprising you.

  How to make friendsmariandrew.substack.com

Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

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  Every earlier wave, the internet included, had to be argued for; AI is the first where nobody has to be persuaded that it matters.

  Their words

  but the thing about AI is that, you know, all of many of these things we were talking about how important they were and how valuable were and trying to persuade people of the importance of them. Yes, even the internet. That may sound surprising, but there were people who would weren't thinking that was important. Um but AI, there's kind of no argument about how important it is. People can't can I mean, you cannot put blinkers on to deny the importance of this thing.

  youtube.com

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

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  The most surprising thing about the last three years is not the technology but how few people recognise we are near the end of the exponential.

  Their words

  I will tell you though what the most surprising thing has been. The most surprising thing has been the lack of public recognition of how close we are to the end of the exponential.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Until, a reversible-cryopreservation company, and previously the founder of the Longevity Fund.

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  We already reversibly cryopreserve whole human bodies, at the few-hundred-cell stage, so the open question is scale and not possibility.

  Their words

  And so that's the last thing which was very surprising to me which is that like we already reversibly cry preserve tissue including human tissue including whole body human tissue at that very very small like you know in a couple hundred cells stage

  youtube.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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  Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz

  Their words

  Jazz is messy, and musicians seem to court disaster night after night. What can product leaders learn from how these artists approach their art? Barrett’s entertaining book formed the backbone for

  bringthedonuts.com

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

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  Intuitive physics can be learned from passive observation alone, so an embodied robot is not required to understand the physical world.

  Their words

  But it seems like you can understand it through passive observation, which is pretty surprising to me. And again, I think hints at something underlying about the nature of reality in my opinion, beyond just the cool videos that it generates.

  youtube.com

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  Pillow Book

  Their words

  A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.

  escapingflatland.substack.com

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  Conquest of the Useless

  Their words

  A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.

  escapingflatland.substack.com

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  Pensées

  Their words

  A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.

  escapingflatland.substack.com

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  Carnets

  Their words

  A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.

  escapingflatland.substack.com

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  Brown and Blue Notebooks

  Their words

  A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal's Pensées, Simone Weil's private essays, Lichtenberg's waste books, Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, Kafka's diary, Joubert's Carnets, Wittgenstein's Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.

  escapingflatland.substack.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  Impressive-looking benchmark improvements often result from comparing against a poorly-tuned baseline rather than a genuine advance.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  It's easy to get impressive-looking results if you're comparing against a poorly-tuned baseline, and that observation turns out to explain a surprising fraction of supposed improvements.

  blog.nelhage.com

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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  On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)

  Their words

  I won't spoil anything by saying more but the novel is really lovely and captivating, pulling surprising meaning and depth from repetition.

  countercraft.substack.com

Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.

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  The Thief Collector

  Their words

  The Thief Collector (US) 3.6 This documentary on a pair of art thieves is extremely enjoyable, despite a somewhat clumsy execution in places. Surprising revelations keep popping up throughout its 100-minute running time.

  themoneyillusion.com

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, working on particle physics, extra dimensions and dark matter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The surprise is not that most of the universe is invisible to us, but that the matter we can see makes up as large a fraction as it does.

  energy

  Their words

  In fact, I would say it’s more surprising that the matter that we know about is constitutes as big a fraction of the universe as it does. We’re limited, we’re human. The fact that we see 5% of the energy density of the universe, about one sixth of the energy density in matter, that’s remarkable.

  youtube.com

Political scientist at the University of Chicago and the leading exponent of offensive realism; wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Russia's refusal to accept NATO on its border is exactly what the United States demands for its own neighbourhood.

  RussiaAmerica

  Their words

  Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And if we don't like great powers coming into our neighborhood, it's hardly surprising that the Russians did not want NATO on their doorstep.

  youtube.com

Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.

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  Having any ordering to follow, even an arbitrary one, helps overcome indecision about where to start work

  Their words

  There's a surprising amount of value in having any order at all (even an arbitrary one like first-come-first-served!) to break past indecisiveness about where to start.

  Post 48: Prioritise Tasks by Rating not Sortingneelnanda.io

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

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  Relying on metatables for method lookup tends to produce surprising, unpredictable behavior.

  Their words

  This is a common problem with using metatables; they can lead to surprising, unpredictable behavior.

  in which five different paths lead to methodstechnomancy.us

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.

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  Skin in the Game

  Their words

  Taleb is always filled with surprising ideas and confrontational bragging. Ignore the hot air and gather the gems. Great thoughts around putting your ass on the line with consequences — not just thinking things in theory but doing things in reality — in the real world.

  sive.rs