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Joey Hess
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20 September
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
This blew up beyond anything I expected. The responses are surprising too: 40% says that, duh, this is already the reality at my job. Yes, at mine too. Another 40% agrees with some adjustments and different timelines. Then 20% disagree. Of those that disagree, some, of course, call me an idiot and that I only build CRUD apps and so on. Not surprising, it's the Internet after all. But there are two other categories of criticism that I find fascinating. One is that people say I work on AI and that is why I would predict AI to take over. The shovel seller says you should dig, is the criticism. I… Quoting @thorstenball Most predictions I see are still way too conservative. Here's mine Related
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Today modern advertising, public relations and corporate values statements typically carry any equivalent constraints to the old-fashioned check on rhetoric imposed by the imminent expectation of contradiction by an opposing equally-platformed counter-advocate. Contrast 1858’s Lincoln and Douglas, “divid[ing] time and address[ing] the same audiences” in seven three-hour debates, with modern corporate values statement radiating outward to “stakeholders” forever, and you can measure what... 1/ Related
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Their words
the distinctive modern pathology is unopposed rhetoric: values statements and PR that pre-empt criticism as they are designed to never face an advocate on the other side.
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braddelong.substack.com
19 September
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
Spoiler: It's not a psyop. You can disagree with the view that AI is a meaningful x-risk (I do!). And it's worth understanding that people who are worried about this have often been worried about it for decades, long before there was money in it. Coordinating messages != psyop. Quoting @DavidSKrueger I feel blessed to have gotten so much new engagement from accounts that this AI risk is a psyop. I have been deeply involved in both technical AI research and AI risk reduction efforts for over a decade, so personally I'm confident it's not a psyop. But I can understand why people who lack this kin… Related
The EAs I know are generally lovely people, smart, thoughtful. I have a very low p(doom). I know many people with one much higher than mine. I believe each is sincere. AI safety debates are getting heated. Let's assume sincerity and good will of people we disagree with. AI alignment Related
18 September
Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.
it begs the question: what's the next programming primitive to be replaced with matrices? for loops? functions? while statements? what does the "language for intelligence" look like? Quoting @southpolesteve I've seen people describe Jev as an "AI if statement". But what if it actually WAS an if statement? Introducing Probably: a programming language powered by Jev: https://t.co/6OqaNPRK6b Jev baked into the language. “feels” asks a question. “match” routes between descriptions. “while” keeps going unt… Related
16 September
Front-end developer and writer; co-founder of CodePen, founder of CSS-Tricks, and co-host of the ShopTalk Show podcast.
13 September
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
METR is an excellent organization and also not nearly sufficient on its own. We need a diverse and large ecosystem of technically skilled and independent assessment bodies. I don’t think anyone—not even METR itself—would disagree with this. We should not anoint METR as the sole evaluator. Related
11 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.
Thinking of politics as “defeat the enemy” is easy and energizing. Thinking of politics as “working together even if we disagree about some big things” is hard and exhausting. Quoting @zachweinersmith.bsky.social Appropos of a thing I'm working on, I really appreciate people who do honest to God across-ideology consensus building. In my small experience with it, it can be extremely stressful. And lots of people talk about its importance while being mad about it when it happens. Related
9 September
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
It is important to distinguish between rational arguments and moral arguments. If one says 'A super intelligent will kill us all'. They are making a moral statement, not a rational one. It is the same type of statements as in 'if you don't put plastic walls in the grocery stores, the elderly will die'. Or 'if you drive a gasoline car, you are destroying the planet'. All of these statements have a rational basis. But the rational basis is secondary in practice. The person making the statement does not have to provide rational evidence, and providing contrary rational evidence will not affect t… Quoting @cmuratori I don't follow this explanation. Could someone at one of these labs complete the thought publicly, so I can understand exactly what is being proposed? What difference would it make if your company "gets there first"? What specifically are you going to instruct your first-mover human-extinction-capa… Related
Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.com.
People often think these posts come from researchers who don’t truly believe them. I disagree, that’s not been my experience with Ant or OAI or any other researcher at or near the frontier. I find them to be intellectually honest in terms of believing what they say. However I don’t think any one company or community or discipline or school of thought should represent an entire industry that is so obviously critical. We need new and diverse sources of thought and epistemology here including in the terms we use. as an example: what do the creators of the open models think ( now many here and ab… Quoting @hilbertspaess I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below. Related
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.
Register for my FIRST EVER live workshop on how to become a Supercommunicator. This isn't a workshop on listening harder or being nicer. Instead, it's a specific, learnable move to connect with anyone - even the people you disagree with - that you can start using in your very next conversation. Tonight's dinner. Tomorrow's meeting. That call you've been dreading. I'm super excited about this and hope to see you there! Click the link below: charlesduhigg.com
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8 September
Economist and journalist; Financial Times columnist as The Undercover Economist, author of How to Make the World Add Up, and presenter of the Cautionary Tales podcast.
AI and the new age of mass toe-treading at work. Really thought-provoking from @sarahoconnor_ as.ft.com
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6 September
Canadian software developer and writer, co-editor of the XML and Atom specifications and formerly of Sun Microsystems, Google and AWS. Has written the blog ongoing since 2003.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@bcantrill/117220486316266236 Bryan makes important points, then veers into a convincing Pangram testimonial. Oxide is now requiring public statements to be Pangram-negative. #clankerslop Related
Professor of strategic studies at St Andrews; wrote How the War Was Won and The Strategists, and writes weekly on the war in Ukraine.
4 September
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
3 September
Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.
27 August
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.
Register for my FIRST EVER live workshop on how to become a Supercommunicator. This isn't a workshop on listening harder or being nicer. Instead, it's a specific, learnable move to connect with anyone - even the people you disagree with - that you can start using in your very next conversation. Tonight's dinner. Tomorrow's meeting. That call you've been dreading. I'm super excited about this and hope to see you there! Click the link below: charlesduhigg.com
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26 August
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Anthropic
Their words
The world would be so fucking boring if we constantly sought 100% compatibility in our opinions and in our politics. And when it comes to my code generator, which is what Claude is, I don't need it to share all my politics.
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youtube.com
20 August
Computer scientist and director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative; her research covers distributed systems, databases and digital currency.
This is a good analysis on the Stripe and OpenRouter acquisition! But I disagree with the Fortune 500 stuff at the end. Stripe has always been about capturing the wide swath of new companies, of which a few might grow to be Fortune 500s. Quoting @regulatorynerd @pbreit It fits a couple of things — 1) Stripe has a history of M&A around developer tooling, dating back to them buying runkit. 2) Hard to argue with the theory of being payments for developers when they're the clear market winner for devs who need card acceptance + they've translated that mindsha… Related
9 August
Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.
6 August
General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.
I disagree, I don't think this has to be "game-over" for Google. I do think they have only one play left now - to pull from their own Android/Kubernetes playbook and fully embrace open-models. It's the obvious move in this situation. Details here: p3institute.substack.com
Quoting @firstadopter Jeff Dean and Demis Hassabis are the two most important AI executives at Google. Jeff is leaving and Demis is stepping down from day-to-day operational leadership at DeepMind. Game over. Google Related
20 July
Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.
Their words
Some people think CI means you reject grammar books. I disagree. I often reference grammar materials and find these explanations useful. However, the focus of my learning is not to “master the rules”. Grammar resources simply help me notice and make sense of patterns in the language.
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blog.thelinguist.com
18 July
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
Waiting for someone to dig up the UK statements protesting Chinese nationalizations in 1956 Quoting @ReutersChina China's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday that it would closely monitor the United Kingdom's nationalisation of Chinese steelmaker-owned British Steel and will take appropriate measures to safeguard legitimate rights and interests if warranted. China Related
12 July
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.
From one piece
The Network State
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
9 July
Head of Instagram since 2018, previously head of Facebook's News Feed.
Their words
It has to be controversial that you have to be a reasonable person should be able to disagree with it because otherwise you're probably just trying to compete on raw execution
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youtube.com
29 June
Criminal defence lawyer in New York; writes Simple Justice, mostly about how criminal law works in practice rather than in theory.
22 June
Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.
11 June
Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.
8 June
Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.
10 May
Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.
Their words
as leaders we get so focused on value statement mission statements we forget the mission statement is not the mission. The map is not the territory. Mission is an emergent property of the living superorganism of the thing we're birthing.
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youtube.com
24 April
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
10 February
Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.
Since nobody else is talking about AI these days, check out my conversation w/ @azimshariff, sponsored by the International Telecommunications Society & the Munk School. It’ll be fun! (Azim and I disagree about a few things.) February 19, 9:30–10:30 AM EST eventbrite.ca
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23 January
Pen name of the Canadian-American writer behind mrmoneymustache.com, a blog on frugality, early retirement and index-fund investing that has run since 2011.
What do YOU think, fellow @Tesla owners? I personally disagree with almost everything the company has changed about the cars in the past few years. Bring back more physical controls and don't make people fuck with a touchscreen while driving. Keep autopilot because people want to control their own speed and lane selection sometimes, and so much more. Or watch the sales keep going to competitors. If I had to replace my 2023 model Y right now, a used one would be more valuable than a new one. Related
1 January
Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.
Their words
The stand-out non-fiction book of the year was Rory Stewart's Politics on the Edge. I have a lot of disagreements with Stewart's political positions (the more I listen to him, the more disagreements I find), but he is an excellent memoirist who skewers the banality, superficiality, and contempt for competence that has become so prevailing in centrist and right-wing politics. It's hard not to read this book and despair of electoralism and the current structures of governments, but it's bracing to know that even some people I disagree with believe in the value of expertise.
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eyrie.org
28 December 2025
Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.
Their words
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is a surprisingly weird and weirdly underrated novel given how many copies it sold and the popularity of the blockbuster franchise it spawned. The story weaves together many apparently disparate threads and there are extensive speculative digressions into the biotechnology, business interests, and institutional dynamics that make the park possible and its dissolution inevitable. If the movie is supremely entertaining, the book is supremely thought-provoking.
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eliotpeper.substack.com
Their words
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré is a perfect espionage novel: tight, taught, twisty, and thought-provoking. Le Carré brings the subtle machinations of intelligence operations to vivid life, illustrating their geopolitical ramifications and human cost with equal care.
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eliotpeper.substack.com
12 December 2025
Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.
Their words
And if you translate, “He will,” in a literary text, “He might,” then the whole text is different. The whole text is different.
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youtube.com
13 August 2025
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
Who believes in China’s output gap? I recently wrote a piece at my job, and somewhat unusually for us, it’s come out from behind the paywall so that everyone can read it. Here’s the opening: There are two statements about China’s economy that receive broa…
China Related
30 June 2025
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
Their words
He hasn’t posted since January, but I hope he gets back to it. We need more musings, especially musings I strongly disagree with so I can think about and explain why I disagree with them.
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thezvi.substack.com
Their words
Most of the time, when I read one of his posts, I disagree with it. But it is almost always interesting, and valuable to think about exactly what I disagree with and why. The questions are always big.
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thezvi.substack.com
19 February 2025
Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.
13 February 2025
Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.
RFC: Target Modifiers This RFC introduces the concept of "target modifiers," flags that can cause unsoundness if compilation units disagree on them. We propose failing the build if rustc detects disjoint target modifier sets between units, w…
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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
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else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
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About the English under a post
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The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
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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.
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