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Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Foundation is really about individuals with extreme agency and puzzle-solving ability having outsized impact on a universe that would otherwise decay

  Their words

  foundation is ostensibly a sci-fi series about empires, psychohistory, and hard technology, but really it's about individuals with extreme agency and puzzle-solving ability having wildly outsized impact on a universe that would otherwise just sit there waiting to decay

  @threepointone on Xx.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

  A leader too impatient to sustain a waiting game will undermine strategies built on economic pressure and waiting out an adversary.

  Their words

  Trump is lousy at playing a waiting game, and that's what this strategy entails

  The Trump Administration Strategy Faildanieldrezner.substack.com

Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Human initiative to experiment without waiting for instructions is increasingly important for getting value from AI.

  Their words

  Human agency, the willingness to push, experiment and act without waiting for instructions, seems increasingly important to getting value out of AI

  Agency and Agentsoneusefulthing.org

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The arcane config files and error messages that kept Linux off the desktop are exactly what make it the right operating system for agents.

  Linux

  Their words

  Linux conquered everything else. All the AI infrastructure that everyone runs off, it's all running on Linux. All the systems, all the servers, everything is Linux. So it was kind of a curiosity that the desktop and the personal computers we were using really hadn't been captured, but clearly it was just waiting for this moment. Linux spent the time from '91 to now waiting for agents to fully flourish as an end user operating system.

  youtube.com

Journalist and author of The Art of Noticing; writes the newsletter The Art of Noticing (TAoN) on attention, creativity and the everyday.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  People can train themselves to notice soft fascination anywhere, not only in natural settings.

  Their words

  But I have a hunch (or possibly just a hope) that we can learn to notice our own soft fascinations anywhere.

  Give It A Restrobwalker.substack.com

Founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, a nuclear-reactor company founded in 2023.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The legal pathway to test new reactors sat unused in American law for forty years, waiting for an administration to use it.

  Americagovernment

  Their words

  it's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D."

  youtube.com

Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.

From one piece A self-absorbed giant 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Chinese writers' preoccupation with China alone is what limits China's soft power abroad.

  China

  Their words

  To come to my key point: this self-concentration limits China’s ideological influence in the rest of the world and its soft power.

  A self-absorbed giantbranko2f7.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  China had more ideological influence in the world during the Cultural Revolution than it has today.

  China

  Their words

  Paradoxically, China might have had more soft power when it followed self-destructive policies of Maoist Cultural Revolution.

  A self-absorbed giantbranko2f7.substack.com

Short-story writer and novelist; won the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and teaches craft weekly in Story Club.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Years of apparent failure and waiting can be the artistic work itself rather than evidence of a missing gift.

  Their words

  Someone might have to live a long time before the thing they were born to say becomes fully formed and accessible to them.

  The Natural-Born Artist.georgesaunders.substack.com

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hope is confidence without basis, and a team running on hope rather than belief keeps shipping releases while waiting for something magical to happen.

  Their words

  there's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's it's a prayer, but it's but it's it's not it's not founded in anything that your your lived experience.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An AI-caused recession requires the owners of capital to hit a hard ceiling on spending and then refuse to invest the rest, which is a very improbable combination.

  Their words

  So, what you need is that basically demand to be bounded, like a hard bound, not even like a soft sort of like diminishing sensitivity. You need for them to eventually say, "I've had enough. I don't want to spend any more money." And for that money to not enter as investment.

  youtube.com

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You can contribute to the Linux kernel without touching the kernel, by building the language features the kernel is waiting on.

  Linux

  Their words

  Another thing that's really cool is you can contribute to the Linux kernel without contributing to the Linux kernel, right? because you might take a Rust language feature we need and implement it and now you've contributed to the Linux kernel indirectly

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every cognitive ingredient for farming and for states was already in place tens of thousands of years before either appeared, so what humanity was waiting on was not biology.

  Their words

  So, the cognitive resources for doing this must have all been in place, but it's a very long fuse.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most of the tech tree will never be explored by anyone at all, which is exactly why the choice of which direction to explore matters so much.

  Their words

  Um, there's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be uh, discovered and when it you know, not only we, but but nobody ever is going to to discover most of them. So, choices about how to make how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.

  youtube.com

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A live game has to be architected so it can be hotfixed on a dime; waiting for a client patch to fix what is broken is already too slow.

  Their words

  You know, obviously, we patch our games and that’s where we fix a lot of bugs, but if you really wanna run a game like Overwatch or World of Warcraft successfully, you need master level engineers who have architected the client and server in such a way that you can hotfix the game on a dime.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  What makes low-volume American manufacturing uncompetitive is white-collar overhead and lead time, not the wage of the person running the machine.

  AI and jobsAmerica

  Their words

  Long lead times and soft costs, fueled by the world-leading US wages for "white collar" work, are the root cause of poor performance in low-volume production because there are few units to spread the soft costs over.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The cruelty of the transplant system is what it does to the patient: waiting for a life-changing surgery with no idea when it will be scheduled.

  Their words

  I think the thing that feels the most compelling for me is just like the experience of the transplant patient. It's really I think constricting. It's like you're waiting for a life-changing surgery and you have no idea when it will even be scheduled

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An audience disengages the moment it knows nothing can go wrong, which is why a speech read off the page is dead on arrival.

  Their words

  The audience is waiting for you to get through this thing because they know nothing's going to happen. Like whatever's on that page, that's what's going to happen.

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

Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.

• Dislikedrcmnd.app

  The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

  Their words

  In form and tone it resembles a business class airport book—and this comparison is insulting to the airport paperbacks.

  scholars-stage.org

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

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  NARS soft matte concealer

  Their words

  NARS soft matte concealer. This is the BEST concealer. I've used this for many years and I will never quit it. There is no comparable one for acne.

  avabear.xyz

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  Olaplex conditioner

  Their words

  Olaplex conditioner. I have the shampoo too but I'm pretty sure the conditioner is what makes my hair bizarrely soft.

  avabear.xyz

Fellow at the Manhattan Institute writing on crime, drugs and policing; writes The Causal Fallacy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Putting people into temporary shelter cuts crime and psychiatric emergencies without waiting for permanent housing to be built.

  Their words

  It turns out that simply getting people into temporary shelter—often derided by the homelessness-industrial complex as a band-aid—significantly reduces both social and individual harms of unsheltered homelessness.

  thecausalfallacy.substack.com

American open-source program lead working on WordPress; a WordPress core contributor and release lead who writes at jeffpaul.com.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Cloudup

  Their words

  Cloudup — image sharing, though still waiting for the paid tier to expand beyond 1k images.

  jeffpaul.com

Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A self-respecting theoretical physicist kills most of their own ideas rather than waiting for somebody else to do it.

  Their words

  I totally agree. Sometimes I take too long to come to that conclusion, but I will proudly say, as most theoretical physicists should, that I kill most of my ideas myself.

  youtube.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  New York's subway cost premium is overstaffing, oversized stations and procurement, not high wages.

  Their words

  Well, we’ve divided the New York cost premium into three tranches: labor (mostly overstaffing, not high wages), station and system design, and procurement and soft costs.

  pedestrianobservations.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Shame is used as a tool of cultural coercion because it reliably makes people shrink and stop taking action.

  Their words

  shame has been sharpened into a tool for cultural coercion and compliance. That what people have figured out is that shame is a is a soft spot on almost everybody. And if you press that spot, people will shrink. They will run away. It is particularly used against women, but it is used against large numbers of people to cause them to not take an action.

  youtube.com

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Longevity is not one problem waiting to be cracked: lifespans rose because many separate problems were worked on continuously.

  Their words

  To me, one of them is that longevity isn’t one obscure problem that needs to be ‘cracked’ in order for us to live longer.

  scientificdiscovery.dev

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

  Large language models are generalisations of what we already have; the breakthrough that would let AI discover things is still waiting to happen.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Large language models are more or less generalizations of stuff that we have. There’s still breakthroughs in AI waiting to happen, and maybe they are happening and maybe they’ll be good, maybe not, but that’s not quite the same.

  youtube.com

Designer, architect and scientist, who led the Mediated Matter group at MIT and founded OXMAN, a company that builds products in collaboration with living organisms.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The future of design is soft control: building highly controlled systems whose whole purpose is to enable the loss of control.

  Their words

  So I think the future of design is in that soft control, is in the ability to design highly controlled systems that enable the loss of control.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Every. Writes the Chain of Thought column about working with AI tools and hosts the podcast AI & I.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Superhuman

  Their words

  I’ve been a happy Superhuman subscriber since they were Silicon Valley’s hottest invite-only club, and I’ve been waiting for them to do something like this for a while.

  every.to

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Britain's construction costs exploded because it privatised planning to consultants and risk to contractors, which multiplies conflict and soft costs.

  Their words

  Our best explanation is that the UK adopted what we call the globalized system of procurement, privatizing planning functions to consultants and privatizing risk to contractors, which creates more conflict; the UK also has an unusually high soft cost factor.

  High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com

Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Guns, Germs, and Steel

  Their words

  I have a soft spot for extremely broad histories like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World.

  fivebooks.com

Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A radically new product needs many separate technologies to arrive together, and waiting for that convergence can take decades.

  Their words

  All radically new products, and air taxi eVTOLs certainly count as radically new, require the convergence of many different capabilities and technologies. Often one or more technology will be lagging and it may take decades for them all to come together in the right place at the right time.

  Where Are The Crewed eVTOL Videos?rodneybrooks.com

Founder of OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world; later worked on mapping at Microsoft and Telenav.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fixating on the destination rather than the process leaves you stranded when things go wrong.

  Their words

  If you focus on the goal you'll just be stranded on some mountain waiting for a rescue mission.

  Jurassic Jeep Adventuresstevecoast.com

Writer on time, productivity and limitation; wrote Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and the newsletter The Imperfectionist.

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  There is no phase of life in which the problems are finally solved, and waiting to reach one is the mistake.

  Their words

  That’s why you should give up on trying to reach a phase of life that’s problem-free.

  How to stop trying to escape realityoliverburkeman.com

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

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  Software's constraints are soft where traditional engineering's are hard, and that is one of the few real differences between them.

  Their words

  But constraints in software tend to be soft constraints.

  We Are Not Specialhillelwayne.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Making a living from your own open source means running it as a business and acquiring business skills, not waiting to be funded.

  open source

  Their words

  And yes, you are building a business. You need to start thinking of your project as a business and of yourself as a business owner.

  A few ways to make money in FOSSdrewdevault.com

Front-end web developer at Paravel and co-host of the ShopTalk Show podcast; blogs at daverupert.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  TWONE Journal

  Their words

  TWONE Journal Simple Muji-like brown soft cover travel notebook.

  daverupert.com

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

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  States were born in the richest and easiest country, not in hard marginal land.

  Their words

  Rather than hard, difficult country being the breeding ground for the state, it is in fact the richest, softest areas that were (for those who have been to Mesopotamia and are wondering why it doesn’t seem quite so rich and soft anymore, the word you want to look up is salinization).

  acoup.blog

Management writer; co-author of In Search of Excellence (1982) and author of The Excellence Dividend.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Soft Edge

  Their words

  Rich Karlgaard, The Soft Edge

  tompeters.com

Software engineer working on distributed systems and databases; creator of rqlite, the distributed database built on SQLite.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Unix Programming Environment

  Their words

  The Unix Programming Environment is a book you can't read too soon. It's something I wish I'd come across years before I actually did. An authoritative and comprehensive manual for using Unix as a programmer, it clearly explains concepts such as inodes, hard and soft links, system calls, and the power of joining programs together via stdin and stdout. By the time I came across this book I already knew these concepts, but had never studied them before in one place, and in such a coherent manner.

  philipotoole.com