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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

  AI data centers function mainly as a new way to sustain natural gas demand for an oil-and-gas industry facing declining gasoline demand.

  data centers

  Their words

  one way to understand a data center is that it's a device for burning natural gas, the latest excuse (after Ukraine and Iran) for the fuel that Big Oil is counting on to keep its business model afloat even as the world turns away from internal combustion cars and crude demand begins to drop.

  The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formationbillmckibben.substack.com

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

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  Deleting the rollouts where a monitor caught cheating is structurally the same as positively reinforcing all the cheating the monitor missed.

  Their words

  But if there was some amount of cheating that the monitor didn't catch, then those rollouts wouldn't be removed. And it might be like structurally very analogous to just positively reinforcing whatever the cheating rollouts were that happened not to be caught by your monitor.

  youtube.com

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  Once a technological arms race begins, escalation can be hard to stop even if it leaves everyone worse off.

  Their words

  Once an arms race has begun, strategic uncertainty means that it may be difficult to prevent escalation, even if it ends up making everyone worse off.

  The downside of robot solutionismprogrammablemutter.com

Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

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  Closing and deleting a question to enforce site rules harms the real person who needed help, not just violates policy.

  Their words

  The point is a user is looking for help, and a maintainer is willing to help and knows a solution. They are all real humans. You guys are hurting them by closing and deleting the question.

  Bye, Stack Overflowyihui.org

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

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  Reproductive incompatibility between diverging human lineages grows roughly as the square of their separation time, because it takes pairs of interacting genes.

  Their words

  there's as populations become more apart, there begins to be biological incompatibilities rapidly developing, probably as the square of the distance separation, because you need pairs of interacting genes, and therefore it's the square of the separation.

  youtube.com

Indonesian fullstack engineer, speaker and instructor; writes about JavaScript, SvelteKit and Linux tooling at kalwabed.com.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  SvelteKit

  Their words

  elements, JavaScript reigns supreme. SvelteKit's efficiency and reactivity make it my framework of choice, and TypeScript's type annotations bring a welcome layer of confidence to my codebase.

  kalwabed.com

American author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Undoing Project, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.

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  Until you know how a story ends you cannot know how it begins, and that is why a book with material but no shape cannot be written.

  Their words

  I just don't know where this is going. I don't know what the end is. When I don't know what the end is, I don't know what the beginning is. And it's that simple.

  10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)youtube.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

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  Fever Beach

  Their words

  It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.

  pluralistic.net

Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.

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  The Mongol Empire was the first modern empire, because Genghis Khan invented the idea of one supreme law under which every people keeps its own.

  Their words

  And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I'm putting together that story. And Chinggis Khan was the genius behind that, who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

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  AI favours tiny teams of high-agency individual contributors with blurred roles, and the coordinating manager is not needed until it is time to polish.

  Their words

  Welcome to the era of AI-native companies, where individual contributors (ICs) reign supreme.

  The Death of Product Development as We Know itlg.substack.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

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  An off-grid data centre can delete its uninterruptible power supplies entirely, because the battery bank outside already is one.

  data centers

  Their words

  Deleting the UPSs could knock off ~$750/kW after considering equipment, installation, and square footage reduction.

  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.

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  It is only in dense cities that land dominates the price of a home, and there the land is expensive because of the rules limiting what can be built on it.

  Their words

  It’s only in dense urban areas that the cost of land begins to dominate the cost of new housing, driven by regulatory and zoning restrictions that limit how much housing can be built in a given area.

  What Makes Housing So Expensive?construction-physics.com

Release engineering manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. Keeps a public log at tylercipriani.com of every book he reads, with a rating and notes.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Moonwalking with Einstein

  Their words

  The book Moonwalking with Einstein explores humans' relationship to memory, our ideas of knowledge, and how that's shifted over time. But it begins with an exploration of competitive memorization and the techniques used by memory champions.

  tylercipriani.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  Several Short Sentences About Writing

  Their words

  The 2nd-best and most-radical book about great writing. It tells you to focus entirely on the sentence, an approach that was already my favorite, which is why I bought this book. It recommends you boldly eliminate transitions and conjunctions, split compound sentences, don't save your point for the end, and revise by deleting. This is the first book I've seen printed as one sentence per line —…

  sive.rs

Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

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  Poor internal quality begins to slow a team down within a few weeks, so almost no project is short enough for cutting corners to pay off.

  Their words

  Developers find poor quality code significantly slows them down within a few weeks.

  Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?martinfowler.com