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Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The current capabilities of existing AI models are barely being used and are often not even well understood.

  Their words

  My point is that, while there is a lot of debate over what future models will do, the current capabilities of existing models are barely being used, and are often not even well understood.

  The Overhangoneusefulthing.org

Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solar power's exponential growth will continue until all other energy sources are far below 0.1%.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  The solar power exponential will continue until all other energy sources are <<0.1%

  @elonmusk on Xx.com

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  China scaled solar and batteries when America refused to because the CCP got scared of climate change.

  solarChinaAmerica

  Their words

  China scaled solar and batteries when America refused to, because the CCP got scared of climate change.

  @Noahpinion on Xx.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A U.S.-Canada trade war would cost the U.S. a great deal of time and money to absorb, and is not a trivial disruption Americans would barely notice.

  America

  Their words

  Yes — but it would be expensive and take a great deal of time. In short, if Trump, Bessent and company think that trade conflict with Canada is a trivial issue, one that Americans will barely notice, they’re in for a rude awakening.

  Adding Injury to Insult, Canada Editionpaulkrugman.substack.com

Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rapidly building out cheap solar, wind and battery capacity is currently the one climate action the world knows how to execute at scale.

  solar

  Their words

  there is actually one thing we do know how to do, and that is build out lots of cheap solar, wind, and batteries.

  Facts on the groundbillmckibben.substack.com

Security technologist and author of books including Applied Cryptography and Data and Goliath; writes the Schneier on Security blog and the monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI coding agents pulling unknown code onto corporate networks will be exploited, and it will take the shape of a supply-chain attack.

  coding agentssolar

  Their words

  This kind of thing will be exploited. Think Solar Winds–style supply chain attacks.

  schneier.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solar power combined with batteries has surpassed nuclear power as the superior energy technology for most uses.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  Because solar has, broadly speaking, won the technological race. Intermittency was the last big problem, and batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to make solar reliable.

  Why you won’t get a flying carnoahpinion.blog

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The upcoming U.S. elections are the last real chance to shift fast enough from oil and gas to solar and wind to limit global warming.

  solarenergyAmerica

  Their words

  But physics is giving us very little time now, and so the next set of elections in this country will be, I think, our last real chance to make the sea change-replacing oil and gas with sun and wind-that is our best hope for limiting warming.

  The growing rumblebillmckibben.substack.com

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hand-optimizing hot spots barely matters any more, because the libraries are already fast and CPUs are extremely good at running bad code quickly; what is left is architecture.

  Their words

  One of the reasons that you don't see hotspot optimization as a thing that really matters that much anymore and one of the reasons I advise that architecture and and not making bad decisions is much more important is because a lot of libraries already have been optimized for you that you might use.

  youtube.com

Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.

From one piece Do Religious Families Actually Have More Kids? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Religion barely explains how many children an American family has.

  America

  Their words

  Yes, religion does seem to have an impact on the decision about the number of kids a family will have, but it’s a very minor difference.

  Do Religious Families Actually Have More Kids?graphsaboutreligion.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  American family size has barely changed across three generations of parents; what has grown is the share who stop at one child.

  America

  Their words

  Among the Silent Generation (born 1925–1945), only 15% of parents had a single child. It was 22% of Boomers and 27% of Generation X.

  Do Religious Families Actually Have More Kids?graphsaboutreligion.com

Engineering leader on Google Chrome; writes about web performance and, lately, about working with AI coding tools.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Very few developers understand memory management, and that is why the state of the art in memory debugging has barely moved in years.

  Their words

  I would say, sometimes, I don't know if it's controversial, that very few developers understand memory management. And that makes it even harder to debug memory problems. And so the state of the art around memory debugging hasn't evolved all that much over the years.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, a nuclear-reactor company founded in 2023.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nuclear is empirically the safest form of energy -- safer even than solar, once you count the people who fall off roofs.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount amount of deaths, um it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? that actually most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar and if you add those deaths up it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world.

  youtube.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Staged, controlled rollout of a powerful AI model provides little safety benefit once open-weight versions of similar capability are inevitably released.

  Their words

  At the end of the day, this type of safety barely matters when true open-weights are coming.

  interconnects.ai

From one piece Fun with numbers 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The 'intermittent power' criticism long aimed at solar and wind now applies more truly to other energy sources, including nuclear and natural gas.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  that charge long leveled at sun and wind-that they provide "intermittent power"-is probably truer now of other energy sources

  Fun with numbersbillmckibben.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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 podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Anthropic or OpenAI's revenue could equal or exceed the combined revenue of Elon Musk's public companies within the next one to two years.

  AnthropicOpenAI

  Their words

  it's not out of the question that Anthropic or OpenAI-which barely had any revenue before 2023-could equal or surpass the revenue of all of Musk's public companies some time in the next 12 to 24 months.

  derekthompson.org

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every AI hype cycle produces spectacular demos and very few products, because each breakthrough makes the demo far easier and the tail barely easier.

  Their words

  And that's why every hype cycle produces a wave of absolutely spectacular demos and very few real products. And the recurring mistake of every cycle is spending on the demo when you should be saving for the nines.

  youtube.com

Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Deciding on averages is how product teams destroy the small group for whom a barely-used feature is everything.

  Their words

  there are real downstream impacts to people's businesses that often come from just like a lack of nuance in understanding metrics, particularly averages.

  youtube.com

Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The world is barely ready for this technology, and the people building it have a responsibility to prepare the world rather than only to ship.

  Their words

  you know, the world is like really just, you know, barely even ready for this technology today. And I think, you know, as a builder, we have a responsibility to prepare the world, right?

  youtube.com

Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A future of constrained energy will need more people working the land, and that is not the same as going back to the past.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  but I do think that in a future of probable energy constraint there will be a need for a more peopled agriculture, with populations spreading out to tap diffuse solar energy input.

  chrissmaje.com

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We are near the bottom of the tech tree, not the top; even the list of phases of matter keeps growing and we are starting to design new ones.

  Their words

  And this looks to me like, oh, we're down at sort of the bottom of the tech tree. We've barely gotten started there.

  youtube.com

Austrian developer. Created the libGDX game framework, and more recently the pi coding agent, which moved with them to Earendil — Armin Ronacher's company — in April 2026. Writes at mariozechner.at.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Agentic code search has recall that falls as a codebase grows, so the agent does not find the code it needs -- and which search tool you give it barely matters.

  Their words

  You can give it a Bash tool so it can ripgrep its way through the codebase. You can give it some queryable codebase index, an LSP server, a vector database. In the end it doesn't matter much. The bigger the codebase, the lower the recall. Low recall means that your agent will, in fact, not find all the code it needs to do a good job.

  Thoughts on slowing the fuck downmariozechner.at

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Given the current pace of AI capabilities relative to governance, society will at best avoid only the worst-case outcomes, not the merely very bad ones.

  Their words

  We need to accept that at best, we will just barely avoid some of the worst case scenarios (e.g., an AI-enabled biological weapon that kills billions, a rogue AI takeover, or stable global totalitarianism enabled by AI), given the current pace of AI capabilities relative to the pace of governance.

  We're in Triage Mode for AI Policymilesbrundage.substack.com

American writer and long-term traveller. Blogs at tynan.com about travel, owning few possessions, habits and the gear he carries; author of Superhuman by Habit and Make It Big.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Watchmakers today would build GPS-synced, solar-charged smartwatches, just as watchmakers in the 1800s used the best technology available to them.

  solar

  Their words

  I believe this is the watch great watchmakers would make today, given that back in the 1800s they were using all available technology.

  Gear Post 2026tynan.com

Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Playground

  Their words

  Playground by Richard Powers is a strange and wonderful novel set (mostly) on a remote atoll in French Polynesia that follows the tangled lives of an environmental advocate, a sculptor, a tech entrepreneur, and a brilliant bookworm trying to escape the grinding poverty of Chicago's South Side. The richly drawn characters drive the story, but what I love most about the book is that it's a love letter to the ocean with prose that comes closer than anything else I've read to capturing what it feels like to, for example, dive a thriving coral reef.

  eliotpeper.substack.com

Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits

  Their words

  Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits (in Milk Caramel Sea Salt and Cookie Mix), which single-handedly got me through this work year. I shudder to think how many bags of these I ate, but I can barely finish an essay without one.

  haleynahman.substack.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

From one piece Energy Predictions 2025 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Data centres will end up net suppliers of power to their communities, because a solar plant big enough to keep the machines running spills most of what it makes.

  solardata centers

  Their words

  On the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.

  Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The United Kingdom is the one rich industrial country that cannot run on solar alone, and it has to build wind at scale instead.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.

  Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.com

American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Moana

  Their words

  And in fact, I do like Moana very much. It’s my favorite film out of Disney Animated Studios in the last decade, and even (barely) edges out Coco when you include Pixar in the mix

  whatever.scalzi.com

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

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Framework Desktop

  Their words

  It's an incredible machine, but in the day-to-day, I've actually found I barely notice the difference compared to a $500 mini PC from Beelink

  world.hey.com

Co-founder of Rockstar Games, lead writer of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, and founder of Absurd Ventures since leaving in 2020.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Film found its modern form by 1939 and has barely changed since; games are nowhere near that point and still have a long way to go.

  Their words

  Basically, a modern film is no different from a 1939 film. But with games, I still think we’ve got a long way to go.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Orion was designed without reference to any mission it could actually fly.

  solar

  Their words

  It’s also a capsule to nowhere, designed without reference to any mission architecture that resembles our actual solar system.

  NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Humans barely use reinforcement learning for intelligence — what RL they do use goes into motor tasks, not problem solving.

  Their words

  a lot of what looks like learning is actually a lot more maturation of the brain and I think that actually very little reinforcement learning for animals and I think a lot of the reinforcement learning is actually like more like motor tasks. It's not intelligence tasks. So I actually kind of think humans don't actually like really use RL roughly speaking is what I would say.

  youtube.com

Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A major new interface redesign takes roughly a year of refinement before it looks presentable.

  Their words

  Liquid Glass is currently in a barely presentable state on iOS. It's going to be like iOS 7 and take another year to sand down the rough edges.

  One Size Does Not Fit Allfurbo.org

Pseudonymous writer; posts careful, funny investigations of everyday questions — air quality, seed oils, arguing, chess — usually by reading the studies.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  A vastly superhuman intelligence would still not be able to talk people out of their beliefs, because humans are barely persuadable.

  Their words, before

  I suspect that if you decided to be open-minded, then the Being would probably be extremely persuasive. But I don’t think it’s very common to do that.

  Their words now

  I take it back. Instead of being unsure, I now lean strongly towards the idea that the Being would in fact be very good at convincing people of stuff, and far better than any human.

Co-founder of the AI agent company Sierra, and previously an eighteen-year Google executive who ran product for Workspace, virtual and augmented reality, and Google Labs.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A company working at the edge of the barely possible has to control its own technology destiny, even at the application layer.

  Their words

  This kind of zone of the barely doable, it's super important that to the largest extent possible, you be able to kind of control your own technology destiny.

  youtube.com

From one piece China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  China's advantage in solar manufacturing is neither cheap labour nor a friendlier business environment: the first is gone and the second was never true.

  solarChina

  Their words

  so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solar's growth is not merely continuing but accelerating, and the rate of that acceleration is itself still rising.

  solar

  Their words

  It is not only the case that solar adoption, production, price decreases are continuing. They're accelerating. And the rate that they're accelerating is still accelerating.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for the protein-structure work behind AlphaFold.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fusion and solar are the two energy sources worth betting on, and solar's limiting problem is batteries and transmission.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  I think fusion and solar are the two that I would bet on. Solar, I mean it's the fusion reactor in the sky of course, and I think really the problem there is batteries and transmission.

  youtube.com

Energy and decarbonisation analyst; publishes an annual chart deck on the state of the transition, and was chief content officer at BloombergNEF.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Late-summer solar generation typically takes a larger share of global electricity demand than the prior spring's peak share.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  Shoulder generation (in late summer) of any given year is generally a higher share of global electricity demand than the peak generation (spring) of the year prior.

  Growth Measurementsnathanielbullard.com

Fellow at the Manhattan Institute writing on crime, drugs and policing; writes The Causal Fallacy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Drug enforcement cut casual use and barely touched heavy users, who account for most of the drugs consumed.

  Addiction

  Their words

  But by the available evidence, the War on Drugs was far less successful at reducing use among the “hard core” of users, mostly meaning people addicted to their drug of choice.

  What Was The War on Drugs? Part Vthecausalfallacy.substack.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The failure of wind or solar power to show up has never been the primary cause of a major grid blackout.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  While renewables are almost always blamed in the aftermath of major power cuts or grid disruption - and the way they have been integrated into the grid has certainly been found to compound problems - the simple failure of wind or solar power to show up has never yet been found to be the primary cause.

  Lessons from Spainliebreich.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Chinese solar panels and batteries are cheap because of automation and a honed supply chain, not because of cheap labour.

  solarChina

  Their words

  But, China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.

  sustainabilitybynumbers.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solar power now adds more new capacity to the global grid each year than any technology ever has, and will soon lead in annual electricity added too.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.

  Traveler’s Talesnathanielbullard.com

Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  With more planets than stars in the Milky Way, it has become impossible to believe life was not sparked somewhere else, possibly within a few hundred light years of us.

  solar

  Their words

  It becomes impossible to imagine that life was not sparked somewhere else, in our Milky Way galaxy, and maybe even in our local neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy, maybe within a few hundred light years of our solar system.

  youtube.com

Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  If a lost Ice Age civilisation existed, its traces lie in the Sahara, the Amazon and the drowned continental shelves — the habitable places archaeology has barely looked at.

  Their words

  The places to look are places that were hospitable and welcoming to human beings during the ice age. That, of course, includes the coastlines that are now underwater. Of course, it includes the Sahara Desert. Of course, it includes the Amazon rainforest as well.

  youtube.com

Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Dagger and the Coin

  Their words

  This is a worthy entry in the genre. It suffers a bit from extensive plot not about banking and characters who barely speak to dragons. But all of that irrelevant fluff makes it one of the most underrated fantasy series I’ve ever read.

  bitsaboutmoney.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Plug-in hybrids have moved past being a worst-of-both-worlds compromise and are now genuinely thriving.

  Their words

  Neither condition is now true, but plug-in hybrids are thriving.

  Inflecting and Overtaking, SunPower, Waymonathanielbullard.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.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  The Black Company

  Their words

  Mind candy military fantasy, in which Our Protagonists find themselves working as mercenaries for the Dark Lord's only-barely-less-evil ex-wife, on whom the narrator develops an unhealthy crush.

  bactra.org

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  The White Rose

  Their words

  Mind candy military fantasy, in which Our Protagonists find themselves working as mercenaries for the Dark Lord's only-barely-less-evil ex-wife, on whom the narrator develops an unhealthy crush.

  bactra.org

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Shadows Linger

  Their words

  Mind candy military fantasy, in which Our Protagonists find themselves working as mercenaries for the Dark Lord's only-barely-less-evil ex-wife, on whom the narrator develops an unhealthy crush.

  bactra.org

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good project management is nearly invisible when things are going well.

  Their words

  Good project management is barely visible-it just feels like "things humming along."

  Categories of leadership on technical teamsbenkuhn.net

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  High infrastructure costs are not Baumol's cost disease: what a country pays per kilometre of subway barely tracks how rich it is.

  Their words

  In fact, even though growth in average infrastructure costs over time is documented, there is very little cross-national correlation between GDP per capita and per-km subway construction costs.

  pedestrianobservations.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Listening for alien radio is the wrong search: a probe that sits and waits beats a signal that passes you by, so an artifact in our solar system is likelier than a message.

  solar

  Their words

  This is the 2001 monolith hypothesis. I would be less surprised to find a quiescent alien artifact in our solar system than I would to catch a radio signal from an intelligent civilization.

  youtube.com

From one piece How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordable 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Letting generators cover one per cent of the year is what makes an off-grid solar data centre affordable, because the last few gloomy days set the whole array size.

  solardata centersenergy

  Their words

  The optimal scenario is typically when the generators supply 1% of yearly electricity (shown below).

  How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A data centre powered by solar and batteries alone needs an array so oversized that the design is not worth building.

  solardata centers

  Their words

  The solar array sizes under these assumptions are prohibitively large.

  How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A house is built by trades that barely coordinate with each other, which is what makes housing cheap to design and almost impossible to redesign.

  Their words

  What is different about construction is the level of coordination that takes place: whereas in a car everything is carefully designed to tightly integrate together, in housing construction the work can be done (and often is) with surprisingly little coordination between the various trades.

  What Makes Housing So Expensive?construction-physics.com

Independent policy analyst on space and national security, formerly of the RAND Corporation, who writes on counterspace weapons and rules for keeping satellites safe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A spacecraft built to service satellites is also a weapon, because the same robotic arm that refuels one can disable one.

  solarChina

  Their words

  If a Chinese spacecraft can dock with a friendly satellite to refuel, repair, or transport it, the same robotic arm can also disable a US satellite’s solar panels and antennas. Alternatively, China can use these spacecraft to tow satellites into locations where they can, at best, only sub-optimally perform intended duties such as early warning, surveillance, or geolocation.

  thespacereview.com

Founder of Amazon in 1994 and of the space company Blue Origin in 2000.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A solar system holding a trillion humans is the right thing to aim at, because a population that size would have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins alive at once.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins. That our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.

  youtube.com

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Society's response to AI is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid transformative progress that many experts expect, with safety research lagging and governance lacking mechanisms for misuse, recklessness and autonomy.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Society's response, despite promising first steps, is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress that is expected by many experts. AI safety research is lagging. Present governance initiatives lack the mechanisms and institutions to prevent misuse and recklessness, and barely address autonomous systems.

  arxiv.org

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Lime is a blind spot in economic history: cheap coal made it widely available as a soil treatment and raised farm output, and the standard growth estimates barely mention it.

  Their words

  Yet lime is a huge blind spot for economic historians, despite it increasing the productivity of what was still by far the largest portion of the economy: agriculture.

  Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coalageofinvention.xyz

From one piece Biofuels: the US could switch to electric cars and solar power on just a fraction of the land 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An acre of solar panels powering electric cars carries you orders of magnitude further than an acre of crops grown for fuel.

  solar

  Their words

  You can drive about 150 times as far from a solar-powered electric car compared to using corn bioethanol.

  hannahritchie.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We worry about the land solar needs while ignoring how wastefully the world already uses its farmland.

  solar

  Their words

  While we fret over the amount of land needed for solar, we are often blind to how inefficiently we have used the world’s farmland.

  hannahritchie.substack.com

Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An acre of solar panels powering electric cars carries you orders of magnitude further than an acre of crops grown for fuel.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  an acre of solar panels generates as much energy as 100 acres of corn grown for ethanol.

  A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solutionmichaelgrunwald.substack.com

Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Doing the science first does not win the industry: America laid the scientific groundwork for solar and Chinese firms ended up making the cells.

  solarChinaAmerica

  Their words

  Consider the solar industry, for which the US laid the scientific groundwork, only for Chinese firms to make all the photovoltaic cells.

  2022 letterdanwang.co

Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The price level behaves as the aggregate of mostly backward-looking decisions rather than as an asset price, except during hyperinflation, so expected future primary balances barely affect it today.

  Their words

  I believe that, except in times of hyperinflation, the price level does not behave as an asset price but as the aggregate of billions of mostly backward-looking decisions, and that expectations of future primary balances have little effect on the price level today.

  Fiscal Policy under Low Interest Ratesdirect.mit.edu

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  After four more doublings of installed solar capacity, solar electricity will cost about 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.

  solarenergy

  Their words, before

  And beyond that, by the time solar scale has doubled 4 more times, to the equivalent of 16% of today’s electricity demand (and somewhat less of future demand), we should see solar at 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas, and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.

  Their words now

  Both of those forecasts were wrong. Solar has plunged in price faster than anyone – including me – predicted.

From one piece Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020) 5 beliefs · rameznaam.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solar's future price should be predicted from how much has been built, not from how much time has passed.

  solar

  Their words

  We can use the last decade to predict the future prices of solar power. Not by looking at the cost of solar as a function of time, but by looking at the cost of solar as a function of cumulative scale of the solar industry.

  Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)rameznaam.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solar has got cheaper faster than even its most optimistic forecasters expected.

  solar

  Their words

  In short solar prices have dropped faster and lower than almost anyone has expected.

  Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)rameznaam.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Demand for electricity will rise to absorb far more solar than is currently considered feasible.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  Add these up, and it’s plausible that solar’s contribution to the energy system could double or triple the amount currently considered feasible for solar to provide.

  Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)rameznaam.com

+ 2 more

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Average solar electricity prices in sunny parts of the world will fall to one or two cents per kwh by 2030 or 2035.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  This incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable.

  Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)rameznaam.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every doubling of the solar built worldwide has cut its price by 30 to 40 per cent, and that learning rate is why the price keeps falling.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  The data paint an incredible picture: One that shows the price of solar electricity from utility-scale systems dropping by anywhere from 30-40% with each doubling of cumulative solar deployment.

  Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)rameznaam.com