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

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine

  Their words

  I guess you can’t go wrong with Charles Petzold. This book is excellent and highly recommended to anyone interested in computing. Must read for computer science students and software developers.

  rakhim.org

Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Public stadium subsidies rarely generate enough economic benefit to justify their cost

  Their words

  economic research has repeatedly found that they rarely generate enough marginally income, employment, or tax revenue to justify the subsidy.

  The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshitderekthompson.org

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

  Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards does not reliably carry a model's pretrained ethical understanding into its actual behavior.

  Their words

  In short, RLVR gives us no reason to expect the normative representations learned in pre-training will acquire motivational force over a given action, especially when post-training repeatedly selects trajectories for terminal task success.

  The Sorcerer’s Apprenticesecondbest.ca

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  When institutional transformation keeps failing, leaders should start fresh with new entities rather than keep reforming the old ones.

  Their words

  we've both come to believe that when transformation fails repeatedly, it's time for something different, and one of the tools that leaders need to add to their tool belts (and probably use a lot more frequently than they do today), is starting fresh, creating new entities (agencies and departments, for example) and either endowing them with new authorities or transferring authorities from legacy institutions to the new ones.

  Thinking the unthinkableeatingpolicy.com

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

  The West's biggest blindspot is repeatedly underestimating China's speed and capabilities.

  China

  Their words

  The West's biggest blindspot is repeatedly underestimating China's speed and capabilities

  levels.io

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A theory of everything would not finish physics: Turing and Church laid down computation's theory of everything in the 1930s and we have spent ninety years exploring the consequences.

  Their words

  People will sometimes talk about um you know, a theory of everything as a potential goal for for physics. And and then there's this presumption somehow that physics is done once you get there. And of course, this is this is not true at all if you think about computer science.

  youtube.com

Developer and podcaster; created Instapaper and Overcast, co-founded Tumblr, and co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast.

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  The tech industry today is dominated by scale-driven optimization and growth at the expense of the idealism that once drove it

  Their words

  Immense scale, soulless optimization, and an insatiable thirst for growth dominate its behavior and discourse, leaving little room for the spirit and principles embodied by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

  A letter to John Ternusmarco.org

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

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  People who extrapolate from first-principles models have a stronger track record predicting AI progress than those who wait for empirical proof.

  Their words

  Extrapolators have a remarkable track record in the AI field, being repeatedly early to trends and capabilities that empiricists believed were still decades away.

  Empiricists vs. Extrapolatorssecondbest.ca

Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Chatbot interfaces are the wrong tool for meaningful coding work, because you are mostly hoping the model recalls the right answer and correcting it requires a human in the loop.

  OpenAIGoogle

  Their words

  Immediately cease trying to perform meaningful work via a chatbot (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini on the web, etc.). Chatbots have real value and are a daily part of my AI workflow, but their utility in coding is highly limited because you're mostly hoping they come up with the right results based on their prior training, and correcting them involves a human (you) to tell them they're wrong repeatedly.

  My AI Adoption Journeymitchellh.com

American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.

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  Coaches who depend on clients paying them repeatedly avoid the corrections that might drive those clients away.

  America

  Their words

  American tennis coaches do not want to get fired. They want you to continue to pay them.

  get goodblgtylr.substack.com

Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.

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  The one thing no science-fiction writer dared predict is that the Turing test would be passed and nobody would notice.

  Their words

  And you know what no sci-fi author dared to predict is that the Turing tests just passes by.

  youtube.com

Economist at the Hoover Institution; wrote The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and blogs as The Grumpy Economist.

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  Trust in institutions has fallen because the institutions have been repeatedly and spectacularly wrong.

  Their words

  Well, when the institutions are over and over spectacularly wrong, whether just incompetent, politicized, or mendacious, there is a reason for loss of trust.

  Climate turning pointgrumpy-economist.com

Professor at Berkeley working on robot learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence, and argues that robots will learn from data rather than be programmed.

From one piece Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The brain is more parallel than a GPU, and an embodied model should run perception, planning and memory at once rather than one token at a time.

  Their words

  it's something like this that the brain is extremely parallel. uh it kind of has to be just out of just because of the biohysics. U but like it's even more parallel than your GPU.

  youtube.com

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  Having a job to do is what makes perception tractable, which is why an embodied model can learn from vision where a video model cannot.

  Their words

  Uh and its perception is in service to fulfilling that purpose. And that is like a really great uh focusing factor. We know that for people this really matters. Like literally what you see is affected by what you're trying to do.

  youtube.com

Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  China's economy will not collapse, whatever the West has been predicting on and off since the 1980s.

  China

  Their words

  Collapse is such a strong word, and the West has been using this word repeatedly. If I remember correctly, maybe four to five times, maybe even six times since 1980s during the period of China’s fastest growth. I tend to not think that Chinese economy will collapse.

  youtube.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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  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

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

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  Inventing a manufacturing technology and building a competitive industry on it are separate achievements, and America has repeatedly done only the first.

  America

  Their words

  But in turning these innovations into competitive industries, America has come up short.

  Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?construction-physics.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.

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  The embodied, interactive, multi-modal nature of human first-language acquisition is hard to replicate in current AI models.

  Their words

  the embodied, interactive, and multi-modal nature of first language (L1) acquisition is challenging to replicate with current models.

  True Zero-shot MTruder.io

Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

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  The West's biggest blindspot is repeatedly underestimating China's speed and capabilities.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  I worry however that one of America’s superpowers is to spin up yarns to reduce the urgency for action.

  2023 letterdanwang.co

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

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  When a model behaves unreliably, the better fix is to switch models rather than repeatedly sample it to work around the inconsistency

  Their words

  The optimal thing to do with a fickle model, however, is to swap it out for another.

  huyenchip.com

Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Number: The Language of Science

  Their words

  Though the book perhaps gets a little too math-ey by the end (and this is coming from someone who is literally teaching discrete mathematics to university students at the moment), Dantzig provides a compelling overview of what we mean when we talk about "numbers," and why this is a question that we must repeatedly keep re-visiting.

  calnewport.com