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Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building institutions that can incorporate diverse perspectives, adapt flexibly to change, and keep public legitimacy is the central challenge of state capacity today.

  Their words

  Creating institutional forms that can incorporate diversity and respond flexibly to a changing environment while maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of citizens is the fundamental project of state capacity that faces us.

  programmablemutter.com

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

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  The difficulty of incorporating a company in Germany is understated rather than exaggerated, and it pushes founders to incorporate elsewhere.

  startups

  Their words

  Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.

  @patrickc on Xx.com

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

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  The release of Opus 4.5 in November 2025 was the dividing line, because it was the first time an agent produced work uncannily close to what its user would have written themselves.

  Their words

  Then we get to November 24th, 2025. Opus 4.5, to me, was the dividing line, where suddenly... I didn't even try it on the 24th. I think I tried it on the 26th. I give it a couple of tasks, and I realize that the quality of the output is uncannily close to what I would've written.

  youtube.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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  There is no real impediment to models running their own research loop and improving themselves at a far more rapid rate.

  Their words

  Um but I think there's no uh you know real impediment to making that be a much more automated loop where the model itself decides it's going to explore or maybe with a nudge from some people uh at the various highest level like oh why don't you try some new ideas around model architectures that incorporate this and then it will go run lots of experiments uh see which ones work and then those will get incorporated at a much more rapid rate

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

Engineering leader and writer; wrote The Manager's Path and Platform Engineering, and blogs at Elided Branches.

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  A career ladder must not be a checklist that guarantees promotion, because a promotion depends on the organisation’s needs as much as on the employee’s skills.

  Their words

  You should not try to create a ladder that functions as a pure checklist or scorecard that guarantees promotion if people check enough boxes; promotions are as much about the needs of the organization as the skills of the employees.

  10 Years of Engineering Ladderselidedbranches.com