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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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Truly self-sovereign AI agents, running on compute no human owner can switch off, are inevitable rather than merely possible.

  Their words

  To be clear, I am not saying the arrival of self-sovereign AI is a good thing. Indeed, I believe there is a chance that the deliberate acts I referenced above will one day be considered crimes, or at least grave sins. Instead, I am saying it is an inevitable thing.

  On the Loosehyperdimensional.co

Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Omarchy could reasonably switch its packaging system to Nix.

  OmarchyNix

  Their words

  A nix based Omarchy would be amazing. Want to see this!

  @mitsuhiko on Xx.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Omarchy could reasonably switch its packaging system to Nix.

  OmarchyNix

  Their words

  Maybe Nix is like Rust: Amazing if you don't have to look at the code! I'm open to the idea that Omarchy Cinque could switch packaging system if I never have to look at nixlang, there are no ergonomic regressions, and we have full repo sovereignty.

  @dhh on Xx.com

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.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Claude Code is the coding agent to build with.

  Anthropic

  Their words, before

  I think I've been coding almost solely on my VPS with Claude Code for almost a year now

  Their words now

  I won't use SnekAI but I'll probably switch to @xAI soon

Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.

From one piece Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation | Dr. Ralph Adolphs 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Emotional skill is not one strategy done well but a repertoire, plus the ability to switch between them according to context.

  Their words

  The most successful skill is if you don't just have one, but you have variety and you can switch between them and you can use context to switch between those.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Switching between tasks carries a real and measurable cost, and switching well is a trainable skill rather than a fixed property of a brain.

  Their words

  So, as soon as you switch into something, there's a cost carried over from the previous task, and you're much slower and more difficult for the couple of next trials on the new task. So, there's always a switching cost

  youtube.com

Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Capability has never been the reason a technology gets deployed: any carmaker could switch the brakes off every Friday, and none does.

  Their words

  humans are capable of doing a lot of things with our tools, but we don't do all of them. For example, today any car manufacturer can say every Friday the brake doesn't work. This is a trivial technology. There's a clock in the car's computer and it just turns off the brake every Friday. But we don't do that because it has deeply bad implications to our human society.

  youtube.com

Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Raw, unhomogenized daily temperature records understate modern extreme heat because of historical instrument and observation-time changes

  Their words

  Third, raw daily data is the wrong tool for this question. Time of observation changes and the 1980s switch to MMTS sensors both suppress modern hot day counts relative to the past, and the raw and homogenized series diverge almost exactly when the instrument transition happened.

  Hot days, cold thermometerstheclimatebrink.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Complex systems are multivariable and nonlinear, so they can behave one way for years and then switch when a single variable changes.

  Their words

  I would describe complex systems as multivariable nonlinear systems. And multivariable nonlinear systems are very hard to predict. They can behave one way for a long time and then one variable can switch and they can behave another way.

  youtube.com

Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A business can have market fit, real advantages, and sustained effort behind a hard product and still fail if it doesn't give customers a strong enough reason to switch from what they already use.

  Their words

  You can build "the hard thing" in a good market, with every advantage, and still lose if what you ship doesn't give people enough reason to leave what they're already using.

  Necessary but not sufficientjustinjackson.ca

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The unsafe keyword does not switch the borrow checker off; it only unlocks a few operations you then have to justify yourself.

  Their words

  And it's interesting to point out here that unsafe does not disable the borrow checker or anything like that. It just gives you a few more operations you can perform that are not safe in general.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There was no genetic switch for behavioural modernity: no selective sweep is shared by everyone alive today in the period the cognitive revolution supposedly happened.

  Their words

  This is like a crazy result because uh it looks like there's no key selective sweeps that have occurred in this period that is ancestral to everyone living today.

  youtube.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

  Comparative advantage stops governing once the power imbalance is large enough: groups then switch into seeking to dominate instead of trading.

  Their words

  and part of it is just power, I think. Like, once there's a sufficiently large power imbalance, um, very often, not always, but very often groups of people seem to to sort of shift into this other mode where they just seek to dominate.

  youtube.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Directing a swarm of coding agents is a different, multi-threaded way of thinking that costs more cognitive load, and the engineers who make the switch have doubled their output.

  coding agents

  Their words

  it required a different way of thinking and the cognitive load might be a little higher but the output is dramatic and we have seen our best engineer double their output.

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Open-source projects are now so flooded with junk contributions that maintainers are asking GitHub for something it has never offered: a way to switch pull requests off.

  Their words

  projects are flooded with junk contributions at the moment to the point that people are trying to convince GitHub to disable pull requests, which is something GitHub have never done.

  youtube.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

  People do not switch from meat to cheap plant protein as they get richer; they switch the other way.

  Their words

  Across much of the world, the opposite is happening: people are switching from these plant-based staples to meat and dairy as their incomes rise.

  Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The best product designers can switch their own taste off and match somebody else's, which is a separate skill from having taste at all.

  Their words

  I think the best, you know, designers on the product side can turn it on and off. They can go, I have my own taste. I know what I like. And then, okay, you're going for this. And that might be different than what I like, but I can match it brand as well.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief executive of Superhuman, the email client; previously founder of Rapportive, which he sold to LinkedIn; a professional game designer before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Your calendar records what you thought you were going to do; only a log of every task switch records what you actually did.

  Their words

  So, this is a technique that I call the switch log. And it's born out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did.

  youtube.com

Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  VS Code and Copilot are loss leaders in an embrace-extend-extinguish play, raising the switching cost until nobody can leave.

  Their words

  Whereas something like Microsoft, they made VS Code as a loss leader. Copilot's probably operating on a loss leader. These things are all getting you so tied into, GitHub, remote workspaces, CI, Copilot, you become this trapped in permanent person and if that price rises, the switching cost is so great at some point that you'll never be able to switch.

  youtube.com

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

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Earth Class Mail

  Their words

  I currently use Earth Class Mail but tbh I'm a bit embarrassed by that and I'm looking to switch to Virtual Post Mail

  karpathy.bearblog.dev

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Virtual Post Mail

  Their words

  I currently use Earth Class Mail but tbh I'm a bit embarrassed by that and I'm looking to switch to Virtual Post Mail

  karpathy.bearblog.dev

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Encryption people have to switch on protects almost nobody; what protects people is what a service turns on for everyone.

  Their words

  To be honest though, it doesn’t matter how secure something is if people aren’t actually using it.

  Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?blog.cryptographyengineering.com

Neuroscientist at UC Davis; studies memory and wrote Why We Remember.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Task-switching destroys memory by chopping an experience into artificial event boundaries, so you spend the whole session catching up instead of building a model.

  Their words

  It just kind of vanished, because what happens, I’m creating all these artificial event boundaries. I’m losing all this executive function every time I switch, I’m getting a few seconds slower and I’m catching up mentally to what’s happening.

  youtube.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

• Our readingkorrents.com

  When a model behaves unreliably, the better fix is to switch models rather than repeatedly sample it to work around the inconsistency

  Their words

  The optimal thing to do with a fickle model, however, is to swap it out for another.

  huyenchip.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Effective altruism's work on the far future is not a bait and switch hiding behind its work on global health; both halves are worth defending.

  Their words

  EA has done a great job working on this (see list of accomplishments above), and I think the AI and x-risk people have just as much to be proud of as the global health and animal welfare people.

  In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com

Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  How to Switch From Evernote to Obsidian

  Their words

  I recommend checking out Nick Milo’s video How to Switch From Evernote to Obsidian if that’s you.

  fortelabs.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

  Meat substitutes have to become clearly cheaper than meat, not merely as cheap, before most people will switch.

  Their words

  Meat substitutes need to be quite clearly cheaper, especially if we want them to break into middle- and low-income markets.

  hannahritchie.substack.com

Brazilian-American staff software engineer working on platforms, AI and developer productivity. Writes about engineering and his setup at ivansantos.me.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Visual Studio Code

  Their words

  Visual Studio Code is my current editor. I've been using it for a few years now and I don't have any reason to switch. I do use vim for quick edits.

  ivansantos.me

Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The off-switch everyone imagines for AI does not exist, for the same reason nobody in the world is capable of shutting Google down.

  Google

  Their words

  Everyone who talks about AI talks about the button, the button to turn it off, right? Do we have a button to turn off Google? Is anybody in the world capable of shutting Google down?

  youtube.com

Designer and engineer; formerly principal research engineer at GitHub Next; writes at wattenberger.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementing and evaluating; a chatbot forces the switch every few seconds and kills flow.

  Their words

  Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementation and evaluation. When I work with a chatbot, I'm forced to frequently switch between the two modes.

  Why Chatbots Are Not the Futurewattenberger.com

Designer, illustrator and CSS developer known for single-div CSS illustrations, a yearly portfolio redesign, and a set of single-topic side-project sites.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Sublime Text

  Their words

  For coding, I use Sublime Text and mostly build my sites with Pug, Stylus, plus Grunt or Gulp. I'm a bit of a late adopter and tend not to switch tech until I'm forced to.

  usesthis.com

American senior staff engineer working on developer and user experience and open source; writes at adamdehaven.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Schiit SYS

  Their words

  Schiit SYS - A simple, 2-input passive preamp. No electronics. No power. No distortion. Just a 2-way switch and a potentiometer. SYS stands for "switch your,...er... schtuff."

  adamdehaven.com

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Schiit Modi 3

  Their words

  Schiit Modi 3 - An affordable DAC that makes my computer audio sound, well, really good. The Modi also features a 3-way input switch.

  adamdehaven.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  OBS Studio

  Their words

  In OBS you can set up keyboard shortcuts, so I set up a few to associate certain keys under the lefthand of my keyboard with different scenes so that I could switch between them easily

  3blue1brown.com

American software engineer; worked on code-server at Coder and teaches TypeScript and open-source contribution. Publishes at joeprevite.com.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Kinesis Freestyle Edge

  Their words

  I switch between an Apple Magic Keyboard (personal) and a Kinesis Freestyle Edge (work). The Edge is a split keyboard and I am a huge fan!

  joeprevite.com

Software engineer and founder of Block Party; previously an engineer at Pinterest and Quora, and a co-founder of the non-profit Project Include and the tech diversity data project Where are the Numbers?

• Usesrcmnd.app

  IA Writer

  Their words

  For longer-form writing, I switch somewhat randomly between iA Writer, Byword, and Medium (in the browser).

  usesthis.com

Programmer and designer who writes at tonsky.me; author of Fira Code, DataScript and AnyBar.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Nintendo Switch

  Their words

  For entertainment I’m super happy with the Nintendo Switch, which has a multitude of great games

  usesthis.com

Cryptographer; created Signal and the Signal Protocol, and writes occasionally about cryptography, web3 and sailing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Encryption people have to switch on protects almost nobody; what protects people is what a service turns on for everyone.

  Their words

  By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update.

  Reflections: The ecosystem is movingsignal.org

Ruby and Rails core committer known online as "tenderlove"; maintains Nokogiri and works on Ruby performance.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Vim

  Their words

  I use Vim as my editor. I've been using Vim for about 16 years, my entire programming career. I've been using Vim for so long that I basically can't switch.

  usesthis.com

Game designer; lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, founder of Sirlin Games (Yomi, Puzzle Strike) and author of Playing to Win.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Logitech Bluetooth Easy Switch Keyboard K811

  Their words

  I used to use the Apple Wireless Keyboard but I switched to the Logitech Bluetooth Easy Switch Keyboard K811 because it allows me to easily use a keyboard with my Apple TV.

  usesthis.com

Web infrastructure engineer and standards editor; chaired the IETF HTTP working group and co-authored core HTTP and Atom specifications.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  TextMate

  Their words

  Textmate is for editing. I'm just making the switch to the alpha version of Textmate 2; I tried Sublime Text 2, but didn't feel the love.

  usesthis.com

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Sublime Text 2

  Their words

  Textmate is for editing. I'm just making the switch to the alpha version of Textmate 2; I tried Sublime Text 2, but didn't feel the love.

  usesthis.com

Mac and iOS developer; created NetNewsWire and MarsEdit, co-created the JSON Feed format, and blogs at inessential.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Consolas

  Their words

  Somehow, just in the past few days, I've finally moved from Monaco to Consolas. I never thought I'd switch from Monaco. (I would have gone with Menlo, but it's a bit too blurry for me.)

  usesthis.com

Programmer and entrepreneur; co-founded GitHub and created Jekyll, Gravatar and the Semantic Versioning spec.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Mailplane

  Their words

  I have five different Google Mail accounts. Mailplane makes it easy to switch between these accounts and keeps my email separate from the rest of my browsing, just the way I like it.

  usesthis.com

Interactive fiction author and hacker; wrote Spider and Web and Hadean Lands, and designed the Glulx virtual machine.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Dell U2410

  Their words

  The 17" Apple Studio Display that I bought with it died a couple of years ago (touch-sensitive power switch went wonky) so I dropped in a Dell U2410 monitor. The Dell is awfully nice, except that it has that OLED color oversaturation problem.

  usesthis.com