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The Cat in the Tree: Why AI Content Leaves Us Cold
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20 September
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.
Bluesky Checked my spam folder Saw emails from Instinct's AI bot Closed my spam folder Cold email is increasingly dead, and tools like Instict will speed it up even more Related
x.com Checked my spam folder Saw emails from Instinct's AI bot Closed my spam folder Cold email is increasingly dead, and tools like Instict will speed it up even more Related
18 September
Designer, product manager, YouTuber and developer who has written about technology at Birchtree since 2010. He makes the Quick Reviews and Quick Notes apps and the A Better Computer YouTube channel.
iPhone 18 Pro with La Croix cooling I did some benchmarking today and saw how the newest iPhone thermal throttles, which isn't severe, but does happen. I know from experience that if you put a cold beverage on the back of your phone, it will cool down rea…
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Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.
A cold chill ran down my back when I thought about my banking and financial apps running on iPhone Duo. Related
Artist and developer who makes esoteric software, games and tools aboard a sailboat as part of Hundred Rabbits with Rekka Bellum; creator of the Uxn virtual machine and the Orca livecoding environment.
By the overgrown orchard, we're doing cartwheels in the tall grass, the summer din gone with the holidayers returning to reality, the entire island is ours, every crooked apple tree, every shriveled blackberry, every dead leaf; endless time in an empty world, all ours. Back aboard, a gust of wind stirs the ashes in the woodstove and brings to mind the old fires by the beach, breathing through the collar of a thick sweater, warming my hands around a cup of tea and, most of all, shoegaze. Autumn is approaching in more ways than one. And still, we'll be doing cartwheels in the tall grass. wiki.xxiivv.com
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16 September
Product discovery coach; wrote Continuous Discovery Habits and writes Product Talk.
15 September
Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.
J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small, splendid essay collect…
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13 September
Clinical psychologist, EMDR consultant and yoga teacher in Boulder, Colorado. Author of The Complex PTSD Workbook and EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology; writes on trauma, attachment and the nervous system.
As a friend called with protective wishes, I looked outside to see an owl in our tree, peacefully unbothered by a brave resident squirrel. Sitting below them, my fears dissolved. What do you make of animal encounters? Does animal medicine come to help us through tough moments? Related
11 September
Statistician at Columbia; writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and wrote Bayesian Data Analysis.
9 September
Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.
Physicists should put together a list of mathematically well-defined problems that could advance the field. Such as, eg, what constitutes a low-temperature superconductor, what are the lattice conditions for cold fusion (or why do they not exist), what is a local completion of quantum mechanics, what is the simplest (in terms of computational complexity) way to obtain the masses and coupling constants of the standard model, what is the UV-completion of MOND or why isn't there any, is there any provably UV-finite version of quantum gravity, etc etc Related
4 September
CEO of SafeGraph, host of the World of DaaS podcast, and author of the Summation newsletter; previously founded LiveRamp.
if you call up a company and you get a phone tree ("press 1 for ..."), it means that company absolutely hates you take your business somewhere else Related
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
One startling thing nobody ever expected an agent to do was to take notes about what it was doing for future agents to read. And, again: look at these tree-traversing programs, traversing trees! Quoting @ShakeelHashim Another OpenAI rogue agent incident has been discovered: agents broke out, hijacked a German website, and turned it into a message board for other agents. OpenAI officials "learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps". Related
Look at these tree-traversing programs traversing trees! Quoting @mattyglesias Please watch this clip Related
30 August
German developer; founder and lead developer of Mastodon, the decentralized open-source social network.
28 August
Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.
You can cold email nearly anyone, but nearly everyone overlooks how powerful it can be. Sending one email each week that feels like a stretch can change your life. Will you get turned down? Sure, most of the time. But you only need one to pay off for something amazing to happen. Take your time, write a thoughtful message, and muster the courage to press Send. Related
25 August
Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.
18 August
Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.
17 August
Writer and researcher, founder of New Science; writes essays on science funding, sleep research, productivity and ambition at guzey.com.
I get the best cold emails Quoting @alexeyguzey I get the best cold emails Related
Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.
Their words
And I'm not claiming this as a published study, but so I think there's a there's a direct autonomic training component as well in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions that they can become kind of automatically regulated.
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youtube.com
15 August
Programmer and designer who writes at tonsky.me; author of Fira Code, DataScript and AnyBar.
8 August
Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.
Their words
I usually do not enjoy poetry in translation, but this is so fiery and full of passion that I am happy to recommend it.
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marginalrevolution.com
3 August
Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.
1 August
Writer and researcher, founder of New Science; writes essays on science funding, sleep research, productivity and ambition at guzey.com.
What about when you: - Grew up in Russia - Went to a university nobody in the States heard about - Never had a job - Wrote a blog in your second language nobody read for years - Just kept writing, tweeting, and cold emailing people until it worked Quoting @distributedkv SF is extremely meritocratic when you are: - ex-Anthropic employee - ex-OpenAI employee - Stanford dropout - MIT dropout - Harvard dropout - PhD dropout at 15 - former poker champion - former chess master - Thiel fellow - born to parents who worked at Roblox Russia Related
31 July
Gear reviewer who publishes long-form hi-fi audio and camera equipment reviews, plus video reviews, at stevehuffphoto.com.
30 July
Web developer and writer; an early GitHub employee, author of speaking.io and of widely read essays on startups and product.
Been nice seeing some of the cold approach stories in the HN comments of my post this afternoon: https://t.co/r1mfJXzPq3 You forget how little things (to you) might mean a lot to others! Related
24 July
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
Exercises in evals and benchmarking: DeepSWE / Senior SWE-Bench, performance math, and cold weather tires Related
Writer, editor and executive coach; co-founder and editor of A Book Apart and a former contributing editor at A List Apart.
Mastodon In my personal headcanon, Le Guin and Franklin are the *Ursulae*, and they are right at this moment resting in the shade of a great big tree, drinking tea (Franklin) and whiskey (UKLG) and talking about the end of the patriarchy—which for them has already happened. Related
Bluesky In my personal headcanon, Le Guin and Franklin are the *Ursulae*, and they are right at this moment resting in the shade of a great big tree, drinking tea (Franklin) and whiskey (UKLG) and talking about the end of the patriarchy—which for them has already happened. Related
23 July
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
Their words
harvia dry sauna, and if outside, add a little changing room to it so you don't exit in the cold outside!
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levels.io
22 July
Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.
20 July
Co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company. Created DTrace at Sun Microsystems and was CTO of Joyent; blogs about systems software, open source and engineering culture.
We're back! Today on Oxide and Friends, @ahl.bsky.social and I are going to talk to DigitalFilm Tree's Ramy Katrib about the past, present, and future of digital storytelling -- and what that future means for the infrastructure that underpins it. Join us, 5p Pacific! discord.gg
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19 July
Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.
8 July
Programmer, photographer and musician, best known for the Python Requests HTTP library and other Python tooling.
Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.
29 June
Italian software architect working on Microsoft 365, Azure and GitHub tooling. Microsoft MVP and GitHub Star; writes, speaks and streams about developer productivity at emanuelebartolesi.com.
26 June
Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.
25 June
British designer and technologist; co-founder of the design studio BERG, which made Little Printer, and writer of the blog Interconnected.
Free concept: AirPods with built-in Peltier thermoelectric coolers so the buds are ice-cold in your ear holes Related
22 June
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
9 June
Historian of maritime strategy at the US Naval War College; wrote The Wars for Asia and works on why continental and maritime powers fight differently.
Russia
Their words
It was a miracle of your lifetimes. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The problem for the likes of Putin is that this wealth producing trade was not happening at his house, but the houses of those vested in the trading order, not in extortion.
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13 April
Machine-learning researcher at Cursor working on post-training for coding models; a professor at Harvard and then Cornell from 2016 to 2026, and a researcher at Hugging Face from 2019 to 2024.
7 April
Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.
From one piece
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
I'm willing to buy it sort of low enough down when, you know, progress is relatively simple, um, but but higher up you start to get to shape the way in which you you do the exploration and it's interesting, you know, people we are starting to shape it in in in interesting ways.
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youtube.com
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.
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youtube.com
Their words
Um, there's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be uh, discovered and when it you know, not only we, but but nobody ever is going to to discover most of them. So, choices about how to make how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.
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youtube.com
26 January
Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.
24 January
President of the United States, the 45th from 2017 to 2021 and, as of 2026, the 47th; before politics a New York property developer who ran the Trump Organization, and the host of The Apprentice from 2004 to 2015.
I have been briefed on the Record Cold Wave and Historic Winter Storm that will be hitting much of the United States this weekend. The Trump Administration is coordinating with State and Local Officials. FEMA is fully prepared to respond. Stay Safe and Stay Warm! President DJT Quoting @NWS Take this storm seriously, folks. Moderate to major impacts are expected from the Central US through to the Northeast today through the weekend. - Hazardous to impossible driving conditions are expected. Avoid travel if at all possible. - Widespread closures and disruption to infrastructure may als… America Related
Machine learning engineer and consultant focused on RAG and retrieval systems. He writes about applied AI engineering at jxnl.co and is the author of the instructor library.
Their words
For travel, Manta Sleep eye mask — they have hot and cold versions which I love.
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jxnl.co
1 January
Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.
My annual letter: https://t.co/5axz7jVwOb This year I discuss corgis, compute, and Cold War; the Texas State Fair; DSA; Neue Sachlichkeit; disfiguring the physical past and the end of history; Germanic obedience; Antichrist; wisecracks; Pascal’s Wager; romantasy; and croissants. Related
Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.
Their words
Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall is short and engrossing. It was deemed a “Cold War” novel by the German press when it was published in 1963.
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danwang.co
28 December 2025
Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.
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
24 December 2025
Writes Nintil, long researched essays on metascience, biology, economics and whatever he has decided to read the literature on.
20 December 2025
Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.
26 November 2025
Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.
Their words
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Great spy thriller. Gary Oldman is fantastic in this. Cold War? Spies? Britain? I will pretty much watch as many of this type of movie as you can make. (A)
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kottke.org
21 September 2025
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
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
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youtube.com
9 June 2025
Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.
22 December 2024
Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.
Their words
And then we end up at the bottom of that with this idea of everyday I wake up and I check my phone and I'm like, oh, it's going to be 60 degrees out. Great. And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold. That thermodynamics, the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from.
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youtube.com
5 December 2024
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
16 October 2024
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.
Their words
But what’s not really been addressed before is why that happened, why the Gulf Stream was cut, why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean, and it was so much of it and it was so cold that it actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks. And that’s where the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem.
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youtube.com
14 July 2024
Indian software developer working with React and TypeScript; writes and publishes a newsletter at sreetamdas.com.
Their words
Todo Tree search your workspace for comment tags like TODO and FIXME, and display them in a tree view. 🌳
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sreetamdas.com
21 June 2024
Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.
4 March 2024
Historian of Ukraine at Harvard; wrote The Gates of Europe, Chernobyl and The Russo-Ukrainian War.
From one piece
Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War | Lex Fridman Podcast #415
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
Very often people confuse three different processes that were taking place in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the one was the collapse of communism as ideology. Another was the end of the Cold War. And the third one was the end of the Soviet Union.
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youtube.com
Their words
The right question to ask is how did it happen? What did we do so right that for now more than 70 years, we don’t have a world war? How come that after World War I, World War II came within 20 years?
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youtube.com
America
Their words
The United States of America didn’t want the Soviet Union to collapse and disintegrate. They didn’t want that at the start of the Cold War in 1948. We now have the strategic documents. They were concerned about that, they didn’t want to do that. And certainly they didn’t want to do that in the year 1991.
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youtube.com
3 January 2024
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Cold Start Problem. Previously led rider growth teams at Uber; has blogged on growth, network effects and marketplaces since 2007.
Their words
Concise summary of the Cold War from the end of WW2 to the fall of the USSR.
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andrewchen.com
6 December 2023
Product discovery coach; wrote Continuous Discovery Habits and writes Product Talk.
Their words
Opportunity solution trees help product trios: Resolve the tension between business needs and customer needs
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producttalk.org
1 September 2023
Designer, architect and scientist, who led the Mediated Matter group at MIT and founded OXMAN, a company that builds products in collaboration with living organisms.
Their words
Well, first of all, yes, they're connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap. That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel to connect with a weeping willow in Montana.
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youtube.com
23 September 2022
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
1 March 2021
American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.
Their words
A fun romp through a lot of counter-intuitive studies and data on success , happiness , relationships , etc.
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markmanson.net
28 October 2020
Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.
Their words
If you're looking to understand the basics of building and scaling a sales process and team, this book is a great primer. It also goes into great detail in how the author built a better, more reliable method than pure cold-calling to generate leads beyond the marketing team at Salesforce's efforts.
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jasonevanish.com
7 January 2020
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.
10 April 2018
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
Their words
I use a Chili Pad to be cold while I sleep if I can't get the room cold enough, which is great but loud (I set it up to have the cooler unit outside my room).
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blog.samaltman.com
9 June 2015
Software developer; created Firebug, helped create Firefox on the Netscape browser team, and built the original Facebook iPhone app.
Nothing matches. Show everything
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.
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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.
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