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Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Major historical events do not necessarily have deep intellectual or ideological causes; assuming so is a common fallacy.

  Their words

  But I think this impulse to gild the lily and attribute the rise of Hitler to deep intellectual trends is an example of a pretty common fallacy of assuming that an incredibly important world event must have incredibly important roots.

  How to stop Hitlerslowboring.com

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  Agentic infrastructure has become its own discipline inside many tech companies, often via existing infra teams morphing into AI infra teams.

  Their words

  Agentic infra became its own discipline inside many tech companies (often existing infra teams "morphing" into AI infra teams)

  @GergelyOrosz on Xx.com

Principal engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on agents and developer tooling. Streams TypeScript, OCaml and Neovim on Twitch, and wrote the better-result library after writing the same Result type about a hundred times.

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  Discipline does not scale across teams and engineering organizations, which is a huge reason to use Effect.

  Their words

  my take has always been that "discipline doesn't scale" across teams and eng orgs and is a huge reason to use effect

  @dillon_mulroy 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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  Battery storage is becoming the defining transformative energy technology of the second half of the 2020s, as solar and wind were of the first half.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  Batteries are the transformative technology for the second half of this decade, as sun and wind were for the first half

  Fun with numbersbillmckibben.substack.com

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

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  Nobody in software treats debugging as a discipline; it is left as a handful of basic heuristics.

  Their words

  But this is the book that I give to every junior engineer because I think like nobody ever really talks about debugging as like a discipline outside of like basic heuristics.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

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  Craft excellence within each discipline is not going away, however much AI blurs the work across functional lines.

  Their words

  I still see a craft excellence that's really important in the disciplines that I don't think is going away anytime soon. Even if there's fluidity or blurring of the work across the functional lines.

  youtube.com

Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.

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  A defining trait of charismatic 'bad boy' figures is that they lie.

  Their words

  After all, one of the main reasons bad boys are bad is that they lie.

  joshbarro.com

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

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  There is no separate class of natural-born artists: the artistic impulse is ordinary curiosity about life turned into a wish to make someone else feel something.

  energy

  Their words

  I think of it like this: any person has an innate curiosity about life, and an energy toward it, that may manifest itself in all kinds of ways throughout the course of their life.

  The Natural-Born Artist.georgesaunders.substack.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  The Scientific Renaissance, 1450--1630

  Their words

  An old (1962) but still interesting history of the earlier part of the scientific revolution. In every field, Boas traces a basically-humanist impulse to discard medieval ideas and accomplishments, in favor of reviving antiquity, the more antique the better, which only gradually turned towards striving to go beyond Greco-Roman science to something actually new and unprecedented.

  bactra.org

Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.

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  Slop is becoming the defining cultural metaphor of the late 2020s.

  Their words

  "Slop" is fast becoming the central metaphor for the cultural output of the late twenty-twenties.

  RIP Millennial lifestyle brandskylechayka.substack.com

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

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  Rust's defining experience is that once the code compiles it works — not literally true, but true often enough that people keep saying it.

  Their words

  I think part of what I liked about Rust is this feeling that as you write the code when it compiles it works. I mean this has to be in quotes right because obviously it's possible that there are bugs but this is something a lot of people say about Rust and there's a reason people say it even though it's not necessarily literally true.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Cannon

  Their words

  The result is something that's beautiful, sharp, critical and lingering. Long after I closed the cover, I found myself mulling over the delicate ways that Lai raised the contradictions, sorrows and beauty of queer love, racial identity, camaraderie, self-control, and self-indulgence. Lai's characters have no answers, only questions that can never be fully resolved. Instead, these questions are the defining puzzles, defeats and triumphs of their lives.

  pluralistic.net

Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.

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  Delegating a task to an AI agent only works if the output can be verified, which requires defining success criteria first.

  Their words

  You can't delegate what you can't verify, so this requires first defining success criteria and metrics.

  How to Work and Compound with AIeugeneyan.com

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

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  Lasting satisfaction comes from studying how others play, then defining and fully playing one's own game rather than someone else's.

  Their words

  The only lasting path to satisfaction, happiness, skin in the game, maximizing learning, is to really study everybody's game, define your own, and then play it to the best of your ability.

  What you can do in a decadeswyx.io

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

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  Privacy's Defender

  Their words

  This book is a beautiful capstone to a brilliant career that defined the fight for cyber rights, and a deep, accessible dive into the defining tech and human rights battles of this century.

  pluralistic.net

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.

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  A small team is not a compromise: it is the only size at which everyone is in the room for every decision, including the ones outside their discipline.

  Their words

  The bigger the team, the more you become a cog in the machine. And on a small team, the way I like to describe it is you get to have a loud voice.

  youtube.com

Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.

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  Careful step-by-step thinking is a property of the developer, not something a tool or framework can enforce

  Their words

  Notebooks don't force you to write clean code. AI tools don't force you to think carefully. Discipline comes from the developer, not the environment.

  Why I Stopped Using nbdevhamel.dev

Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.

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  A habit only survives difficulty if the person enjoys it, which makes enjoyment a better predictor of persistence than discipline.

  Their words

  Because if it's not fun, if it's not engaging or interesting, if it doesn't feel good, you're not going to stick with it when it gets tough. I mean, this is probably one of the great lessons for life, which is if you're having fun, then then you're dangerous, right? Then you're hard to compete with. You don't want to you don't want to go up against the person who's having a good time doing it because if it feels like a hassle or a chore, that's the person who gives up when it gets difficult.

  The Silent Cost of Bad Habits | James Clearyoutube.com

Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.

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  Capital Evolution: The New American Economy

  Their words

  Seth and his co-author, Elizabeth MacBride, do an outstanding job of defining capitalism clearly and explaining how it evolved into today’s approach.

  feld.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  The one muscle worth training is self-discipline; once that is trained, everything else follows by itself.

  Their words

  I think the main muscle you can exercise is this muscle, the muscle of self-discipline. Not your biceps or your pecs or anything else. Because if you get to train that one, everything else just comes by itself.

  youtube.com

Zurich-based value investor who ran the Aquamarine Fund from 1997 to 2025 and wrote The Education of a Value Investor. He hosts the VALUEx gathering in Klosters and publishes a podcast and newsletter.

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  A culture that emphasizes self-esteem over self-knowledge leaves people less equipped to resist doing monstrous things.

  Their words

  We live in a culture that preaches self‑esteem more than self‑knowledge. That leaves people morally flabby-performing virtue while outsourcing the actual discipline that keeps ordinary humans from doing monstrous things.

  Thoughts on the Conviction of Donna Adelsonguyspier.com

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

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  Defining what expertise looks like in a job family is not HR’s work, and a career ladder left to them will be wrong.

  Their words

  Don’t let (or make!) HR do all of the work. It’s really not their job to define expertise in your functions.

  10 Years of Engineering Ladderselidedbranches.com

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

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  What a shared digital economy needs is interoperability, not cryptocurrency: a database or a standards body does the job, exactly as railway standardisation did.

  Their words

  What you need is interoperability. Interoperability can happen through a blockchain, it can happen through a database, it can happen through standards bodies with defining standards and protocols. And we've been doing it for hundreds of years since the railroads were standardized. And it's not something that totally requires a novel technological solution.

  youtube.com

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

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  Declining many-worlds because it extrapolates past what we can observe is methodologically respectable and still a failure of nerve.

  Their words

  And if you just wanted to be methodologically conservative and say, “That’s a step too far; I don’t want to buy it,” I’m sympathetic to that. I think that you’re just wimping out, I think that you should have more courage, but I get the impulse.

  youtube.com

Historian of Ukraine at Harvard; wrote The Gates of Europe, Chernobyl and The Russo-Ukrainian War.

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  Defining Ukraine's war record by the 20,000 men of the Division Galizien makes the 2 to 3 million Ukrainians who fought in the Red Army irrelevant, which is what propaganda is for.

  Their words

  So, there is a period of collaboration, and that’s what propaganda tries to define him by, or there is a Division Galizien by 20,000 people, and somehow it makes irrelevant the experience of 2-3 million people.

  youtube.com

Development economist; argues that letting people move to rich countries does more for the poor than aid, and wrote Let Their People Come.

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  Wanting to preserve a national culture is a legitimate human impulse and not in itself a racist one.

  Their words

  Valuing traditions, culture and history is simply a legitimate part of the human experience, and there is nothing wrong with preserving that.

  english.elpais.com

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

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  A permanently painful on-call rotation is a five-alarm emergency, not a normal cost of owning code in production.

  Their words

  Being on call should not be a constant cycle of things breaking down and firefighting, or alerts going off at all hours. This is not ‘normal.’ These are telltale signs of a fragile system and lack of alert discipline.

  Why On-Call Pain Is A Sociotechnical Problemcharity.wtf

Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Argues at length for building things, mostly in short form.

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  Industries do not stay competitive markets; over time most settle into a monopoly or, more often, an oligopoly.

  Their words

  a lot of industries over time end up not like that. They end up not being actually a fair and free market with market discipline. They end up as something else. In the business world, what they end up with is either just, you know, one company with a full up monopoly or more commonly they end up with what's called an oligopoly

  youtube.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.

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  The World-Ending Fire

  Their words

  After years of people recommending him to me, I finally took the plunge into the literary world of Wendell Berry. Now I can't help but wonder what took me so long. This 2018 collection of Berry's best essays is a fantastic introduction into his genre-defining polemic style, which mixes razor-sharp commentary with a poetry grounded in lived experience, to argue on behalf of land, the environment, and a slower, richer approach to life.

  calnewport.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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  The point of academic history is to put historical knowledge into the public’s hands so that the public can make better decisions with it.

  Their words

  I am going to contend that the primary purpose of the discipline of history is to foster greater historical knowledge in the public, in order that the public can use that knowledge (and the skills that come with it) to make better decisions.

  Collections: How Your History Gets Madeacoup.blog

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

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  A mass death does not by itself produce a boom afterwards: expecting a pandemic to renew an economy on its own misreads what followed the Black Death.

  Their words

  Using history to understand our present is a great impulse, but it means some of the false myths we tell about the Black Death and Renaissance are doing new damage, one of the most problematic in my view being the idea that sitting back and letting COVID kill will somehow by itself naturally make the economy turn around and enter a period of growth and rising wages.

  exurbe.com

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

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  Progress toward more intelligent artificial systems requires defining and evaluating intelligence so systems can be compared with each other and with humans.

  Their words

  To make deliberate progress towards more intelligent and more human-like artificial systems, we need to be following an appropriate feedback signal: we need to be able to define and evaluate intelligence in a way that enables comparisons between two systems, as well as comparisons with humans.

  On the Measure of Intelligencearxiv.org

Scottish GP and writer; author of Adventures in Human Being, Shapeshifters, Intensive Care and Recovery.

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  Intoxicated By My Illness

  Their words

  I appreciate this book for its irreverence, the elegance of its prose and because the essays in it are succinct, punchy, with the tyrannical discipline that newspaper journalism has to have.

  fivebooks.com