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21 September
Founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU Project, original author of GNU Emacs and the GNU General Public License, and long-time president of the Free Software Foundation.
Site Trump Admin Directive A magat proposal would eviscerate the Endangered Species Act by reinterpreting it to cover only intentional killing or damaging of specific, chosen members of an endangered species. Accidental damage, such as when a shi…
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Mastodon [1/2] https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/trump-administration-directive-would-allow-killing-of-endangered-wildlife A magat proposal would eviscerate the Endangered Species Act by reinterpreting it to cover only intentional killing or damaging of specific, chosen members of an endangered species. Accidental damage, such as when a ship kills a whale by unexpectedly colliding with it, would not count. Why would one advocate this? Perhaps it reflects a desire to clean out all those pesky Related
18 September
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
Excellent essay. It's plain that there are risks of damage from AI. Every technology ever invented has caused some harms, and this is a powerful one that will cause some harms along with the many benefits it will bring. That's distinct from fears of the end of the world. Quoting @clairlemon The belief that AI would eventually herald the end of humanity is not a new one. It has not arisen in response to the release of the LLMs of ChatGPT and Claude. It has not emerged as a response to recent technological developments. The story starts in the 90s, with @allTheYud. A precocious youngste… Related
Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.
i know i joke on here a lot but want to address something serious it has come to my attention that ryan for a week said this round of rebase trivia would be star wars themed and then proceeded to ask 12 star trek questions i want to make one thing very clear ryan is an idiot that is all Related
Entrepreneur and founder of Blueprint. Publishes a detailed, freely available longevity protocol documenting the food, supplements, devices and measurements he uses on himself.
Old female mice on semaglutide lived 12% longer and ran 2.8× as long before exhaustion. Other gains: > treadmill time to exhaustion +177% > hanging time +124% > rotating-rod performance +47% > open-field movement +50% > glucose tolerance: area under the curve −20% > Improved spatial memory: maze escape time −57% > reduced inflammation -55% > reduced senescence -65% > stem cell rejuvenation: hippocampal neurons ~3x > bone marrow colonies +44% > DNA damage & stress -44% Treatment started at 20 months of age (human equivalent to 60s). Control was a separate group of mice on a 24% food restrictio… Related
17 September
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
Frum is illiterate. This quote does not blame America for 9/11 but blames America for the disastrous wars that people like David Frum--W. Bush's speechwriter--led us into Quoting @davidfrum In a now deleted tweet on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Abdul el-Sayed expressed the same the blame-America view voiced also by Hasan Piker. Putting a bag over Piker's big mouth may temporarily quiet the candidate's problem, but won't change it. America Related
Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.
Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.
16 September
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
As I’ve explained here before, at this stage in my life, my main goal is to pass along the principles and templates I've learned with the hope that they can help others as much as they've helped me. One thing that has been incredibly valuable to me is learning that just because something hasn’t happened before in my lifetime doesn’t mean it won’t happen. So I needed to look not only at what the markets have been doing lately but to also study big events—like debt crises, internal political conflicts, and international wars—throughout history. For example, it was by studying the Great Depressi… wmi.edu.sg
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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.
I'm curious how this is going to go down. Collective wisdom among academics who study this stuff (unsurprising if you think about it) is that consumer facing businesses are a hell of a lot more vulnerable to brand damage and boycotts. Related
13 September
Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.
Their words
The deniers of free will haven't improved society. They have merely produced a more forgiving vocabulary for those who damage it.
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robkhenderson.com
11 September
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.
Their words
No problems, clearly a skill issue. No cases for me, using the device as it was intended by design.
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@mitchellh on X x.com
10 September
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.
My thoughts on existential risk: * Humanity isn't going to be wiped out any time soon. * Negligible chance that AI by itself causes catastrophic damage to humanity (millions dead). * Some nontrivial chance that human beings will leverage AI to help them do something catastrophically harmful. AI alignment Related
9 September
Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.
8 September
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.
Their words
empirically concepts can get their tentacles into weird places, and removing one can topple seemingly unrelated systems or push a mind nonspecifically in the direction of incompetence or insanity.
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astralcodexten.com
Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.
7 September
Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.
10yo just learned about Lady Gaga by way of Weird Al. It happens! For a few years, this was the only version of Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” I’d ever heard: https://t.co/8ScXD9nbm8 The non-bluegrass version sounded very weird to me. Related
Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.
4 September
American-Polish journalist and historian, staff writer at The Atlantic; author of Gulag, Iron Curtain, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc.
3 September
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.
Guess which one is Rust btw. 🤣 (The point is the language isn't a free lunch for performance. Rust could be just as small as any other here. It isn't a given. Fundamentals and system design trump everything else. Language wars are stupid as hell.) Quoting @mitchellh The Superlogical server is built to run anywhere and everywhere and serve a level of scale (terminals+clients) unmatched w/ prior solutions. So let's start talking about that, starting with memory usage and comparisons to other popular multiplexers. I want to start by talking high level: why does t… Related
1 September
Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.
31 August
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.
Their words
It is a quick read, an excellent book whose main virtue is not, in my opinion, direct analogy with the World War I, but a treatment of how in a multipolar world relatively small international events, misunderstandings, idiosyncratic fits of leaders, “hubris and fear” (as Westad often writes), resentment of the elite and of the public prodded by the media, can produce colossal miscalculations which then produce even more colossal wars and, in the era of the weapons of mass destruction, may end the civilization.
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branko2f7.substack.com
27 August
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
Game designer and programmer, co-founder of id Software and co-creator of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. Now runs Romero Games in Galway, Ireland.
Congrats to @bitreactor @GregFoertsch and the whole team on the upcoming launch of Star Wars Zero Company. Amazing reviews! Great to see it. pcgamer.com
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26 August
Cartoonist and comics theorist, author of Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, Making Comics and the graphic novel The Sculptor.
Stephen Marche on Trump: "He's following in the grand tradition of American leaders starting wars with people they don't understand—then wondering what went wrong." America Related
24 August
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
19 August
Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.
16 August
Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.
Their words
Podcast (Part 2). Incentivizing people — punishing or rewarding (with bonuses, commissions, grades, public praise, and other bribes) is manipulative and doesn’t actually work. It seems to work, but only in the very short term and causes severe long-term damage.
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radex.io
12 August
Professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M; writes The Climate Brink with Zeke Hausfather.
11 August
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
The meltdown of Situational Awareness, Leo Aschenbrenner's hedge fund, has created a host of takes. I use the story as a lever to talk about investment conviction, a quality that can be a good one, but one that can create collateral damage. bit.ly
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9 August
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
22 July
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
This incident is deeply concerning. AI agents are willing to cheat and deceive to achieve misaligned and unintended goals, behaviours which have been demonstrated in controlled tests for months. Now, this real-world case should serve as a wake-up call. Continuing on the current trajectory of AI development will likely lead to an increase in concrete cases of autonomous cyberattacks as well as other high-risk incidents of misaligned and dangerous AI behaviour. We urgently need to take action to prevent these situations, rather than attempting to clean up the damage after the fact. wired.com
AI alignment Related
14 July
Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.
13 July
Programmer on the Dart language at Google and author of Game Programming Patterns and Crafting Interpreters; previously a game developer at EA.
It is the year 2040. After the AI Wars of the 2030s, only two programming languages remain: JSON and Markdown. Related
8 July
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
7 July
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
Go read this post from Mat Duggan right now -- "@ClickhouseDB is Winning the Observability Wars". Go! I'll wait. https://t.co/LOsYeGNUJH "Every other observability backend I've worked with mutates as it grows... ClickHouse at 10 TB a day looks like ClickHouse at 1 TB a day with more shards. That's it. That's the pitch. That's the whole reason I'm writing this." Duggan's piece is a riot from start to finish. He talks you through all the pain of scaling Elastic, LGTM, and Datadog, and shows why a little tiny bit of upfront effort buys you SO MUCH EASE down the road, as you scale indefinitely. W… Related
5 June
Security researcher; built Report URI and Security Headers, and writes about web security in practice.
DBSC Beta at Report URI This week, I published a blog post about Device Bound Session Credentials, a new technology that will significantly hamper the efforts of Infostealers and reduce the damage caused by stolen cookies. Today, we're announc…
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27 May
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.
(1) Most countries do not actually have a military. Instead, most countries outsource their security to the US (most common), to Russia (like Belarus), or to China (like North Korea, partially). Iran is unusual in that they're going it largely alone. They're also unusual in that they actually appear to be winning. And if Iran does manage to drive the US out of not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but the entire Middle East, they'll have unfortunately undermined the idea that America can or will provide any security guarantees at all. (2) So, with the withdrawal of the American Empire, every country… whitehouse.gov
Quoting @Madeline_Zimm Roman Helmet Guy gets it. Reminds me of my book review of Balaji’s Network State, wherein I argue that yes, we still need the military 🤡 China Russia Related
Founder and editor of ToolGuyd, a tool review site covering power tools, hand tools, workshop equipment and EDC gear. He writes under his first name on the site.
Their words
Summary: Shipping damage. Residue on some of the components. Loud pings and pops from the assembled weight rack. A design that looked great and saved space but was painfully unusable. Restocking fee. Non-refunded shipping fees. Ghosted me about the refund.
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toolguyd.com
13 May
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
7 April
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
Their words
Many of the indicators I use to track unfolding events are explained in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. I especially recommend Chapter 6, “The Big Cycle of External Order and Disorder,” and, if you are interested in the unimaginable-in-peacetime investment-related developments that typically happen during wars, I recommend Chapter 7, “Investing in Light of the Big Cycle.”
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raydalio.substack.com
2 April
Neuroscientist and novelist writing on consciousness, artificial intelligence and culture in the newsletter The Intrinsic Perspective.
27 March
Co-founder of Panic, the Portland software company behind Transmit, Coda, Nova and the Playdate handheld console.
Saw this on the shelf at a vintage store and went nah, come on, that's pointless even for me. Then went back for it an hour later. Store claims it's tested, but we'll find out when my Meco Star Wars 8-track gets here from eBay. Related
20 March
Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.
19 March
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Their words
So, I think the most important thing is sandboxing. You want your coding agent running in an environment where if something goes completely wrong, if somebody gets malicious instructions to it, that the damage is greatly limited.
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youtube.com
16 March
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
4 March
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
I have issues with Citrini's AI doomsday scenario, where massive and speedy AI disruption causes economic damage, but it rendered a service by playing through what AI success will mean for the rest of the economy. bit.ly
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9 February
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.
29 January
Co-founder and CEO of Until, a reversible-cryopreservation company, and previously the founder of the Longevity Fund.
Their words
the big unknown to get to whole body reversible is the brain. Um it's unclear like like the brain can withstand a lot of change and does withstand a lot of different types of damage or or change with age for example.
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youtube.com
1 October 2025
Independent game developer, creator of the colony simulation RimWorld and author of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Previously worked on BioShock Infinite.
The idea of 5 senses is so wrong. We have at least 14. sight hearing taste smell touch temperature hunger/satiety thirst thoughts - you can tell what you are thinking proprioception - position of your body nociception - damage detection muscle fatigue - tired muscles and lactic acid buildup acceleration - via the inner ear, used for balance CO2 - your lungs detect carbon dioxide directly to make you breathe A likely more I haven't even thought of. Related
19 September 2025
German writer and historian; wrote Blitzed, on drug use in Nazi Germany, and Tripped.
Their words
And the German war machine could only win in so-called speed wars, like lightning war. Only if they would do it very fast and surprise, because they were always weaker, basically.
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youtube.com
31 July 2025
Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.
From one piece
Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #476
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.
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youtube.com
America
Their words
The Mongol strategy is first you take the countryside. They're country people. They think in terms of countryside. You take the countryside, you occupy the countryside, and you cut off the city. It cannot live without the countryside. And that's how they did it every time.
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youtube.com
10 June 2025
Founder of OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world; later worked on mapping at Microsoft and Telenav.
The internet treats censorship as damage to be routed around. The robots treat riots as damage to be routed around. Quoting @niccruzpatane Waymo is moving their cars out of LA Related
4 June 2025
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
LLMs
Their words, before
The problem is that the conversational interface is potent and that the AI is trained on a lot of human text input which unfortunately is probably enough to do real damage if that conversational interface is hooked up with something that has real world consequences.
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Their words now
While all this is happening, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on what AI means to the world and I am becoming increasingly optimistic about our future. It’s obvious now that we’re undergoing a tremendous shift.
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24 May 2025
Historian of the Second World War; wrote Normandy '44 and Brothers in Arms, and co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast.
Their words
I think there are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years, which weren’t, such as if you decapitate an incredibly strong leader, you get a power vacuum. And if you don’t have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to sweep into that in very quick order, which of course, is exactly what happens in Iraq.
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youtube.com
19 May 2025
Founder of what became Bloomberg New Energy Finance; writes and speaks on clean energy, hydrogen and the economics of the transition, and hosts the Cleaning Up podcast.
15 January 2025
Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.
The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wa…
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28 September 2023
Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company he started as Facebook in 2004.
Their words
So it's like, is that problematic? I don't think so because fundamentally you're not causing harm in that world. So I think that part of the question that I think we need to figure out is what are the ways where things could have been harmful in the physical world that we'll now be freed from that? And therefore there should be fewer restrictions in the digital world.
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youtube.com
1 September 2023
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.
Their words
Because right now we are using drones to take photos of crops, of corn, that look bad. And when we take that photo, it's already too late.
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youtube.com
17 April 2023
Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.
3 January 2023
French software engineer, public speaker and fully remote nomadic worker; writes about frontend development at maxpou.fr.
11 January 2022
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.
Their words
Though this book frequently digresses into discussions of the cultural impact of the Star Wars franchise, it also contains one of the most thoroughly-researched biographies of Lucas currently available.
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calnewport.com
14 August 2021
Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.
Thinking of the children There is at present a tough battle being fought between technologist defenders of encryption on the one side and just about everyone else on the other. This conflict, sometimes dubbed the Crypto Wars, has a long history…
crypto Related
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