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The two kinds of desire, and one of the most important things I know
The the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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21 September
20 September
19 September
18 September
16 September
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korrents.com
Engineers should be able to explain any customer-facing system they have shipped and defend the decisions they made.Their words
I should be able to pull you aside at any moment and ask you to explain any customer-facing system you've shipped. You should be able to clearly explain how it works and defend the decisions you made.
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Their words
Agent-generated PRs have exploded in size. 9x the last 8 months (!!) No signs of slowing down.
15 September
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Their words
I think we should use this kinds of data to completely turn around Europe's immigration policy: - We should have super easy inflow for immigrants from countries whose previous immigrants have shown low crime rates You're from Japan? Just fly here and you can stay forever - We should then almost completely ban any inflow from countries whose previous immigrants have shown high crime rates with instant deportations
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korrents.com
The typical AI researcher thinks there is roughly a 10% chance that AI will kill everyone.Their words
A few AI researchers pull up the average by being very certain that AI will kill everyone. But the typical AI researcher still thinks there's a ~10% chance that AI will kill everyone.
14 September
13 September
12 September
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Their words
the more that we see actors looking to weaponize without any very good maps of how and what they are doing or what kinds of unexpected repercussions might happen, the more we can expect not simply increased risks of tension and worry, but also people screwing up, doing dumb stuff.
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Their words
I suspect that some of the labs' willingness to put money into the social sciences stems from the realization of senior people that the practical build out of AI is highly unpopular in the U.S and their urgent desire to figure out how to sugarcoat the pill so that it will get swallowed
How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com
11 September
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Their words
Architects oppose the kinds of buildings that most people like.
10 September
9 September
7 September
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Their words
To my mind, if progressive policy hopes to engage with such voters at all - and it is open question whether it should - it must address not just the material realities of relative economic disadvantage, but above all the "outsider" credentials of the AfD.
6 September
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Their words
We may not be able to remove the desire for status, but we can change what earns status.
5 September
2 September
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Their words
there is evidence that the reversal effect has weakened over time, leaving investors who bet on mean reversion and a return to fundamentals in the lurch
1 September
26 August
From one piece DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Agent-written pull requests already outclass those of the median human contributor to an open source project.Their words
But it actually means that if you take the median programmer and their pull requests towards an average open source project, they're already getting outclassed by agents. I would rather get an agent-written pull request to one of my projects than I'd get one written by a human, and it's not just because the quality's better. It's also because I feel a lot less bad if I just reject it.
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Their words
So, in my opinion, this is the absolute best time to ever have been an open source software maintainer. Not only do we get this wealth of glorious pull requests made by agents with all the boxes ticked, we also get to tap into a creativity of people who did not have access to contribute to a project before.
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Their words
I'm not reviewing every pull request anymore. I haven't been reviewing them for quite some time now.
24 August
From one piece How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
You can either increase the reward or change it in some way in terms of something that's meaningful for the person or you change the effort required to accomplish maybe part of the task or perhaps start you know just initiate the task and often starting can be a huge motivational pull.
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Their words
It would also help if your manager said, "Well done for getting that bit done." Right? That's that's also a motivation pull to think, "Yeah, actually I don't need to get the whole piece done to get the reward of somebody identified that as a positive thing to have done."
19 August
18 August
17 August
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korrents.com
Emotions exist because a charging bear demands a response more flexible than a reflex and faster than a plan.Their words
if you have a bear or a tiger, you know, something charging at you, that challenge requires a control of behavior that's intermediate between those two extremes. I can't have a reflex for a bear if it's far away or if it's close or if it's a rattlesnake or or or a tiger or all the different kinds of potential threats out there. Instead, I need something that's more flexible, which emotions are.
16 August
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Ready Player OneTheir words
Loved it! Geeky, nostalgic, lots of action and lots of cool ideas. The pace is great, and it’s hard to pull off in a book this large.
14 August
12 August
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Their words
It's like they have all the wisdom of their most senior engineers looking at every single diff and that is fantastic. Which means that you don't have to worry about remembering and looking and nitpicking and all the things that we're not good at anyway
11 August
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Their words
A few months ago I read an essay about silence by Amir Zadnemat in 3 Quarks Daily, called "The Symphony of Silence: An Exploration of the Sound of Absence"*. The most interesting section was a riff on various kinds of silence, especially in spoken language, each communicating something very distinct despite the fact that objectively each silence sounds (or I guess doesn't sound) identical:
9 August
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korrents.com
Voters are increasingly drawn to fearless, populist 'fighter' candidates over establishment figures.Their words
Abdul's victory is a blow to the Democratic establishment in a crucial swing state-and a lesson in the kinds of fearless, populist, "fighter" candidates that today's voters increasingly want to support.
6 August
31 July
29 July
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Their words
when you start talking about like most interesting domain problems, you have to pull in so much context that basically even writing what the function is supposed to do becomes a nightmare. The imperative program you write that will get correct 99% of the time is probably good enough to use in almost all cases.
28 July
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Their words
But great airplanes are incredibly integrated and everything affects everything else. uh the the best airplane design is interplay of propulsion, of aerodynamics, of structures, of all kinds of optimizations, how you fit the systems into it.
27 July
15 July
From one piece Context engineering with Dex Horthy 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And the plan doc, what was bad about it is it didn't give you leverage. The plan was every single line of code that was going to change like in diff blocks and like all the new stuff to write. And so like people would review these plans. We recommended this. We told people to read the plans. We read all our plans. And then eventually I found myself like I just kind of skimmed the plans.
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Their words
you can slow way down and read every PR and read every line of code. Uh, and then you're only going to really get modest benefits from AI because that becomes I I think you should expect maybe 30 to 50% lift in productivity is kind of what I see when we go into teams
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Their words
So I think the the thing I'm most excited is actually like what we call like iterated loops or like slow loops where we basically have a cron job. We have the loop the the the structure of the loop is really easy. It's like run this llinter fix one thing commit and push and then we run that every night in our GitHub actions and we wake up every morning to one PR that makes the codebase a little bit better.
9 July
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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.
1 July
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Their words
Then you had code review which gave you another level of feedback. You could roll out internally more frequently. And everybody was using Facebook for all kinds of stuff, personal and internal business stuff. So whatever feature you developed, people would start using it immediately. So you get another round of feedback. Then we had this phased roll out process where you'd start rolling your stuff out. If there was a problem, the blast radius would be limited to a a few million people.
29 June
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Their words
To shout “temporary” and pull the plug essentially overnight after immigrants have relied on the government’s representations that they should put their efforts and future into establishing a life in the United States wreaks unfair havoc on the lives of immigrants as well as the welfare of their communities.
SCOTUS Whitewashes Otherwise Racist Decisionblog.simplejustice.us
28 June
27 June
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Their words
Really the only tip I could ever give someone at this point is to pull away, reflect, do something you like, and talk to a human who cares about your current spiraling.
22 June
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korrents.com
Leaders' resistance to remote work is driven by a desire for power and status, not by genuine productivity concerns.Their words
what really drives leaders to resist remote work isn't productivity concern. It's ego. Ordering people in is a power and status move. Leaders want to be worshiped at the office altar.
7 June
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Their words
the way you get best context is by having sensors properly placed around the home that don't necessarily invade privacy, but allow you to pick up a lot of comings and goings and who's who in the room and your voice and these kinds of things.
4 June
27 May
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korrents.com
Gamified learning is medicine wrapped in candy, and in practice children eat the candy and throw the medicine away.Their words
Gamified learning is a bit like wrapping medicine in candy. Yes, it may help some students swallow some instruction they otherwise find bitter, but in practice it’s easy to pull off the candy, consume it, and throw the medicine away.
24 May
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korrents.com
Designers have stopped handing work off — they open the pull request themselves, which changes how companies build.Their words
And what you see when we work with them internally is now they're just like they're just making pull pull requests. Like they don't they don't need to hand it off as much. Sometimes they do but like a lot of times they just make pull requests and it's like the thing is built and that's it and I think that's incredible for the way that companies work
20 May
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Their words
Really the big idea is to say we want the old code to continue working but we still want to change the language. And so the the difference from other kinds of versions of languages I mean Python 2 version Python 3 comes to mind is that you can totally mix and match in any way you want.
18 May
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Their words
Every act of desire involves giving something up, and we don't usually call it sacrifice because we're too busy being delighted by what we picked!
10 May
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Their words
all kinds of famous companies where the thing that destroyed them was not competition. It was not someone else came up with a better product. No, their very success became a liability because the more golden the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher.
22 April
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Their words
Maybe as AI writes more and more code of our code, it's less about like the details of how you express logic in a particular programming language and much more about those kinds of high-level trade-offs.
15 April
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korrents.com
Nvidia did not build a tensor processing unit — it built accelerated computing, whose market reach no ASIC can match.Their words
Our market reach is far greater than any any TPU can any ASA can possibly have. And so if you look at our position, uh we're the only company that that accelerates applications of all kinds.
9 April
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Their words
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other.
1 April
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Their words
had we freeze time, that piece of code could be decomposed in a matter of 3 to 6 months. But it took us 2 years to do that because as we peel out a piece of code, the business keep on going forward, right?
29 March
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Their words
And I feel like it's a very human way of doing web search, right? Because we enter things in the Google and we see all the like citations, the quotations part. But like why would we limit AI to that? If AI already visit a page, why don't just pull the entire page out?
20 March
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Their words
But okay, they shouldn't actually be enacting these ideas. There is a queue of ideas and there's maybe an automated scientist that comes up with ideas based on all the archive papers and GitHub repos and it funnels ideas in or researchers can contribute ideas, but it's a single queue and there is workers that pull items and they try them out.
19 March
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Their words
projects are flooded with junk contributions at the moment to the point that people are trying to convince GitHub to disable pull requests, which is something GitHub have never done.
10 March
12 February
From one piece OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Refactors are cheap now, so he just does them, even when they break other people's open pull requests.Their words
Many times, I just do the refactor because refactors are cheap now. Even though you might break some other PRs, nothing really matters anymore.
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Their words
But I don't want to, like, pull that down because every time someone made the first pull request is a win for our society, you know? Like, it… Like, it doesn't matter how, how shitty it is, y- you gotta start somewhere.
9 February
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Their words
Again, you cannot pay for the externalities by pulling subsidies (there is nothing there to pull
Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com
5 February
2 February
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Their words
I think most people do. I think it may well be hardwired into us through evolution.
21 January
1 January
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korrents.com
When accuracy and belonging conflict, most people take the belief that keeps them accepted by their community.Their words
if you have to choose between, well, I could believe this thing and be ostracized or criticized or outcast from my community, or I could believe this other thing, which may not be that accurate, but it will get me praised and rewarded and accepted by my community. A lot of the time, the desire to belong overpowers the desire to understand.
21 December 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Our Dollar, Your ProblemTheir words
This book manages to pull all of that together in a way that's genuinely readable and engaging, helped along by anecdotes from his own policymaking experience that both clarify the arguments and make them feel concrete and accessible to a much broader audience.
26 November 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
A House of DynamiteTheir words
A House of Dynamite. A very tough watch, but I thought this was fantastic as a tour of some of the different kinds of people who hold the fate of every single person on the planet in their hands every damn day. They’re tired, stressed, distracted, at cross-purposes with themselves, set in their ways, more celebs than leaders, and mediocre. And none of them have ever seen Dr. Strangelove? (A)
31 October 2025
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Their words
You know, I think, I think if you want a long, discursive adventure, a video game is better. If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better.
20 October 2025
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Their words
An average email or line of code is fine. Average art isn’t. To make something alive with AI, we have to resist its pull towards average by working beside it, shaping what it gives, and listening for what’s missing.
26 September 2025
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Their words
But it will not be that easy, as easy as you're imagining because uh that you can lose your mind this way. If you you pull in something from the outside and build it into your into your inner thinking, uh, it could take over you. It could change you.
21 September 2025
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korrents.com
Management today is the willow tree's trick — being sturdy by being flexible — and it is very hard to pull off.Their words
and that's in some ways what allows it to be very sturdy so I Think today management is really about this idea of like be sturdy while being flexible and that is a very hard thing to pull off
19 September 2025
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Their words
So the Navy hired the shoe runners unit from the SS, paid them money, and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and chewing gum and all kinds of things. So this is a big thing, you know. And there are documents to it.
12 September 2025
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Their words
So, I think it'll be the same thing that that we'll see an increase in the scope that we're giving that we're willing to give to the robots as they get better and better where initially the scope might be like there is a particular thing you do like you're making the coffee or something. Uh whereas as they get more capable, as their ability to have common sense and a broader repertoire of tasks increases, then we'll give them greater scope. Now you're running the whole coffee shop.
31 July 2025
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Their words
And when he conquered a city, he always made sure there are plenty of refugees to go to the next city because it's going to weaken them. It's going to weaken their food supply, and they're going to terrorize the people with tales of the millions of people that the Mongols killed with their steel chisel teeth and eating children and all kinds of horrible tales. Genghis Khan encouraged it.
23 July 2025
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Their words
Do you have enough data to make simulations, so that you can create more synthetic data that are from the right distribution? Obviously that's the key. So you need enough real-world data in order to be able to create those kinds of data generators, and I think that we're at that step at the moment.
30 June 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Silver BulletinTheir words
He offers a unique form of grounding on political, sports and other issues, and a way of bridging my kinds of ideas into mainstream discourse. I almost never regret reading.
23 April 2025
5 April 2025
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Their words
But we do not have experience with the kinds of problems we’ll face if we build machines that are smarter and more capable than us, so I feel much less sanguine that an adaptation-based strategy will help us there.
1 April 2025
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Their words
The stereotype is that new managers often micromanage, but at Wave, I've noticed that new managers often err on the side of undermanaging, or being too hands-off, perhaps out of a desire to signal that they trust their reports.
21 March 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World TravelTheir words
If you desire to live a life with more travel and adventure, this is a must read. It challenges our default beliefs about time and money through the lens of travel.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
A Field Guide to Getting LostTheir words
A series of autobiographical essays exploring wandering, uncertainty, memory, desire, and place—embracing the unknown as a gateway to self-transcendence.
9 February 2025
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korrents.com
People will find new kinds of useful work as AI advances, though it will not resemble the jobs of today.Their words
We will find new things to do, new ways to be useful to each other, and new ways to compete, but they may not look very much like the jobs of today.
19 January 2025
From one piece Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #457 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Friedman and Schwartz becomes the playbook for the Federal Reserve. We have lived through this, the financial crisis. The Federal Reserve is ready to loan. Covid, the Federal Reserve does all kinds of new things, because no Federal Reserve chair wants to be in Friedman-Schwartz 2.0 that somebody writes, where they're the bad guy who let the economy meltdown.
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Their words
I think it's always going to be hard to pull off because I think Americans and their elected representatives don't want to provide a universal benefit. They want to provide a targeted benefit because they believe there's a moral component here.
2 January 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
SlackTheir words
My favorite platform for chat, doubling as an excellent center for notifications of various kinds.
22 December 2024
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korrents.com
The 2,500-year-old argument about whether planets are common is settled: every star in the night sky has planets.Their words
In which case, those kinds of collisions are so rare that you would expect one in a trillion stars to have planets. Instead, every star in the night sky has planets.
18 November 2024
1 November 2024
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korrents.com
Personalised online entertainment has got good enough to crowd out socialising, and with it the forming of couples.Their words
My suspicion is that massive improvement in quality of online entertainment crowd out socialising and development of social skills, possibly hurting relationship formation as well as desire for children within marriage.
2 September 2024
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
F.I.R.E for dummiesTheir words
I stand in awe of what author Jackie Cummings Koski has done here. This is a comprehensive overview of what FIRE is and how it is done, fashioned in the famous "for dummies" template. I wouldn't have known how to even begin to pull this together, let alone gotten it over the finish line in such fine form.
13 June 2024
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Their words
So death is a way to make room in the universe for other things to exist that wouldn’t be able to exist otherwise.
9 June 2024
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Their words
My hot take is that JS has the lowest bar of entry to building and being productive (a good thing) but one of the highest bars of any language and stack to building high quality, stable, and reliable software. Very few devs have the expertise to pull off the latter
25 May 2024
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Their words
I don’t think we’ve replicated human intelligence, unless I know that the simulator is making exactly the same kinds of mistakes that people do, because people make characteristic mistakes. They have characteristic biases, they have characteristic heuristics that we use, and those have yet to see evidence that ChatGPT will do that.
23 May 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
Niche ZeroTheir words
High quality, budget grinders were rare at the time. The Niche Zero and other new grinders changed that, and helped make it easier to pull good shots.
18 March 2024
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Their words
A lot more people have died of air pollution than nuclear reactors, for example. But most people worry more about living next to a nuclear reactor than a coal plant. But something about the way we’re wired is that although there’s many different kinds of risks we have to confront, the ones that make a good climax scene of a movie carry much more weight with us than the ones that are very bad over a long period of time but on a slow burn.
10 March 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
China’s World ViewTheir words
Senior academic advisor to the Chinese Communist Party feels most political tensions come from a misunderstanding of China’s world view, hence the subtitle “demystifying to prevent global conflict”, and his intrinsic desire to explain. I love its insights and historical context, especially around “Respect-centered diplomacy” and how the CCP is structured.
7 January 2024
14 December 2023
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Their words
The only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit, which is, if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new endeavors that lots of start-up companies everybody else can do. One of our missions is to be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit, so that there can be a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.
28 September 2023
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Their words
So at some point, I think making it so that you could build an AI version of yourself that could interact with people not after you die, but while you're here to help people fulfill this desire to interact with you and your desire to build a community.
17 January 2023
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Their words
My column is about how we’re going to need plant-based meat, cultivated meat, and all kinds of futuristic genetic engineering to grow enough food to feed humanity without frying the planet.
29 May 2022
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Their words
I’ve noticed that, instead of treating them like other kinds of conflicts—where you put your hands up and admit to them but then do your best to make sure they don’t influence your science—scientists sometimes revel in political conflicts.
Science is political - and that's a bad thingsciencefictions.org
9 June 2021
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Likedrcmnd.app
Startup CXOTheir words
It is the kind of book you will keep by your desk and pull out from time to time to figure out how to approach an issue or to help one of your senior leaders figure out how to do that.
8 January 2021
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Open: An AutobiographyTheir words
It is rare that a sports book captures my attention, rarer still when a sports autobiography does. But “Open” delivers a compelling life story superbly told by an athlete. Desire, motivation, and competitive drive him to the the highest levels of professional tennis, but he loses his interest, and was so often unhappy, confused and unfulfilled by his achievements. As an autobiography, it is bluntly honest, sometimes painful, but most of all a fascinating compelling read.
28 October 2020
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Economics in One LessonTheir words
This economics thought experiment is a classic book originally written in 1946. Like most books that follow Nassim Taleb's "all books worth reading are at least 20 years old" rule, it has timeless lessons throughout. It tackles all kinds of ongoing political/economic concepts like rent control, minimum wage, tariffs, "saving industries", and more.
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The 22 Immutable Laws of MarketingTheir words
My favorite kinds of books are to the point and filled with solid, actionable advice. It's amazing how much wisdom Ries & Trout have fit into a 130 page book. If you want to learn key marketing fundamentals, and avoid major marketing strategy failures, this book is well worth the read.
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Pitching HacksTheir words
This is a really short book that just gets to the point. It's a great checklist to think about what you need to pull together if you're going to raise money from investors. It helps you avoid some common pitfalls and gives you a good start on what you need to do to nail your elevator, recruiting, and funding pitches.
1 May 2020
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Their words
The procedures that have grown up around drug development are a sort of Chesterton's Fence: we shouldn't pull them down without considering the reasons why they were put up.
31 May 2019
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Their words
With regards to sexual desire and songwriting, creativity and desire have always been inextricably linked for me.
8 April 2019
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Hidden FiguresTheir words
The book and movie only tangentially touch on Apollo itself (although it does appear!), but they make the list because they are well worth the read / watch, and they tell an important story of yet another facet of the immense collaboration that was the space program, and the incredible diversity of people and backgrounds and stories and kinds of work that went into making it all work.
3 August 2018
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korrents.com
When a functioning organisation dies, capital that cannot be sold or transferred dies with it.Their words
Functioning firms are repositories of many kinds of capital that cannot be liquidated, and when they die, it is destroyed.
29 November 2017
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
China to ChinatownTheir words
He has drawn together all kinds of different sources that would be a lot of work to find on your own.
1 February 2015
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Their words
No matter what, you'll have to think about color constantly.
1 January 2013
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Music in a New Found LandTheir words
This is a wonderful book, and somewhat forgotten. It's currently very hard to find, here in America at least. It's fantastically vivid and passionate writing about music of all kinds.
17 September 2012
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.