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Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rice, grains, seeds and potatoes used to be peasant foods, while kings ate fresh meat plus imported fruits and spices and had higher-protein diets than peasants.

  Their words

  rice, grains, seeds and potatoes all used to be peasant foods And the kings actually just ate a lot of fresh meat like beef, venison, wild boar, swan, and peacock, and imported fruits and spices like saffron, cinnamon, nutmeg, and pepper A king's diet was high in protein A peasant's diet was low in protein

  @levelsio on Xx.com

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

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  Compute platforms are converging toward one unified, globally distributed system limited only by physics.

  Their words

  The future is one global and unified compute platform, with only known physics as the limiting factor

  @rauchg on Xx.com

Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

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  The upcoming U.S. elections are the last real chance to shift fast enough from oil and gas to solar and wind to limit global warming.

  solarenergyAmerica

  Their words

  But physics is giving us very little time now, and so the next set of elections in this country will be, I think, our last real chance to make the sea change-replacing oil and gas with sun and wind-that is our best hope for limiting warming.

  The growing rumblebillmckibben.substack.com

Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

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  A narrow, highly accurate model can beat a general one inside its own domain, as AlphaFold did, and materials science and chip design are next.

  Their words

  I mean I think like if you look at uh my colleagues work on say alpha fold that was a very specific model for uh protein folding and it was highly successful um and was able to really handle that domain quite well so that all of a sudden you now have this amazing tool and model that can give you answers to questions about proteins and their structure um really effectively um but it's not a general model it's a very specific one and there are other I domains where that kind of approach can work really well. Uh maybe in material science or chip design or things like that that uh will enable you to leverage the capabilities of a very accurate but but niche model uh to do things that are hard today.

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

Physician and neuroscientist at the University of Washington; researches brain health, metabolism and athletic performance.

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  The relationship between energy intake and brain size is a bell curve: chronic caloric excess leaves you with a smaller brain, just as chronic restriction does.

  energy

  Their words

  And what they found is there's kind of this um bell-shaped curve between energy availability and brain volume. And in general, brain volume, right, the more the better, right, we think. And so if you're chronically calorically restricted, your brain is smaller um because you just don't have the resources to invest in, you know, the structure um and to maintain it. At the other end, you see the same thing. So if you're chronically in a chronic state of chloric excess, you also tend to have a smaller brain on average.

  youtube.com

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

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  Factory-made bacterial protein cannot feed the world, because meeting humanity's protein needs that way would take more electricity than the planet generates from renewables.

  energy

  Their words

  To meet the global population’s protein needs through factory-produced bacterial protein in 2024 would have used more than the total global electricity generated using renewable (hydro, photovoltaic and wind) energy

  chrissmaje.com

Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

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  Tailwind is a good way to build a site you're happy with, even without strong CSS skills of your own.

  CSS

  Their words, before

  I ended up making this site with Tailwind CSS, and it helped me make a site I felt pretty happy with my minimal CSS skills and just 2 evenings of work!

  Their words now

  I’m a lot better at CSS than I was when I started using Tailwind Ultimately Tailwind is limiting: if you want to do Weird Stuff in your CSS, it’s not always possible with Tailwind. Those limits can be extremely useful (a lot of this post is about me reimplementing some of Tailwind’s limits!) but at this point I’d like to be able to pick and choose.

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

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  Biology has already handed us an alien library: hundreds of millions of protein machines we do not understand and can only study one at a time.

  Their words

  we've been gifted uh just this incredible variety of machines which we don't understand really at all and we just have to go and sort of try and understand them on a you know, one-by-one basis.

  youtube.com

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

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  AI may eventually replace programmers, but the craft of programming will survive the way knitting did, and you were never just a programmer: you are a builder.

  AI and jobs

  Their words

  I- I can relate that if you very deeply identify that you are a programmer, that it's scary and that it's threatening because what you like and what you're really good at is now being done by a soulless or not entity. But I don't think you're just a programmer. That's a very limiting view of your craft. You are, you are still a builder.

  youtube.com

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

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  Mass production is no longer what limits a rich country's military power; trained people and a technological edge are.

  Their words

  The modern world is so bountiful that mass production is no longer the limiting factor.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

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.

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  People do not switch from meat to cheap plant protein as they get richer; they switch the other way.

  Their words

  Across much of the world, the opposite is happening: people are switching from these plant-based staples to meat and dairy as their incomes rise.

  Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com

Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Dead Weight

  Their words

  Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein: Certain parts of this book really stuck with me and changed how I think, like the chapter on the psychological effects of restriction.

  haleynahman.substack.com

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

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  Attitude, not the surrounding circumstances, determines how hard parenting feels.

  Their words

  none of the imagined deficiencies in your situation are more limiting than your attitude.

  nateliason.com

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.

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  A performance test without an explanation of its limiting factor should be treated as unanalyzed and possibly bogus.

  Their words

  Any performance test should be accompanied by an explanation of the limiting factor, since no explanation will reveal the test wasn't analyzed and the result may be bogus.

  brendangregg.com

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

From one piece Demis Hassabis: Future of AI, Simulating Reality, Physics and Video Games | Lex Fridman Podcast #475 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  We have not scratched the surface of what classical, non-quantum computers can do; they can already go far further than anyone expected.

  Their words

  I think we've proven, and the AI community in general that classical systems, Turing machines can go a lot further than we previously thought. They can do things like model the structures of proteins and play go to better than world champion level. And a lot of people would've thought maybe 10, 20 years ago that was decades away, or maybe you would need some sort of quantum machines to quantum systems to be able to do things like protein folding. And so I think we haven't really even sort of scratched the surface yet of what classical systems so-called could do.

  youtube.com

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  Fusion and solar are the two energy sources worth betting on, and solar's limiting problem is batteries and transmission.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  I think fusion and solar are the two that I would bet on. Solar, I mean it's the fusion reactor in the sky of course, and I think really the problem there is batteries and transmission.

  youtube.com

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

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  Language models have not made misinformation meaningfully worse, because distribution, not the cost of writing convincing text, was always the limiting factor.

  Their words

  There's some research that shows that the distribution is actually the limiting factor. So language models haven't yet made misinformation particularly change the equation there.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

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  We will have AGI-grade intelligence well before it reaches the economy, because what limits deployment is the cost of running it rather than the capability itself.

  AGI

  Their words

  The important thing about, hey, is cost a limiting factor here? My view is that we'll have really awesome intelligence, like AGI, before we have it permeate throughout the economy.

  youtube.com

Medicinal chemist; has written In the Pipeline, the drug-discovery blog, since 2002, and the “Things I Won’t Work With” posts about chemicals that try to kill you.

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  AI will not produce a big breakthrough in biological understanding any time soon, because biology has nothing like the clean, complete, high-quality data that made protein-structure prediction work.

  Their words

  So for these reasons, I (unfortunately) do not expect any big AI-driven breakthroughs in biological understanding any time soon.

  AI and Biologyweb.archive.org